Search Results: "bam"

14 February 2010

Jaldhar Vyas: This is Bad News...For Obama

You did it!. The results are in and Barbie is going to become a Computer Engineer. Though I should note that in the vote amongst girls who are members of barbie.com, TV Anchor got the most votes. Bah!

7 February 2010

Joachim Breitner: If I were a caricaturist

I d draw a caricature involving a Toyota car, representing capitalism, with a stuck gas petal and Barack Obama trying to fix it. But as I cannot draw very well, especially recognizable people, I created this collage:
The photo of Obama was created by Beth Rankin.

3 February 2010

David Welton: Italy vs Google

I'm starting to notice a pattern here: One way of seeing things is that politicians and businessmen in Italy noticed Google was actually making quite a bit of money, and even if they don't quite understand this internet thing, they want some of the loot. And while Google certainly is becoming big enough to be cause for worry and discussion, the moves against them in Italy do not seem anything like a rational response calculated to offset severe failures in the market. In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens. Maybe, after China, we'll see Google quit Italy as well?

21 January 2010

Jaldhar Vyas: There's No Hope With Dope

With Guantanamo Bay about to be shut down, and President Obamas' first year in office complete, what do the American public think of him?
% of Americans who approved of Pres. Bush after one year in office
% of Americans who favor waterboarding the Christmas bomber
% of Americans who approve of Pres. Obama after one year in office
How did this happen? Well, once upon a time, the USA was really racist. Then a light skinned African American with no negro dialect entered the presidential contest and the country entered a new post-racial era. Unfortunately not everyone had the audacity to hope. Things got so bad, people wanted to cut obamas nuts off but the change we sought within us prevailed and became president. Unfortunately some parts of the US are still filled with overweight Jesus and gun loving Walmart shoppers who insist on voting Republican even though that party doesn't exist anymore. Why? Racism. It's the only possible explanation

31 December 2009

Mike Hommey: About names and international affairs

Christian writes about the nightmare of using the proper name for people in an international context. I ll add that even in the same country/culture, you can have a hard time, because of another factor: the generational context. People don t necessarily address other people from their generation the same way as they would address people from different generations. And these rules may also vary when people age. Even people from the same generation can have different ways to address people. All in all, naming someone is complicated everywhere, though it is more complicated in international context. I ll also add that there are at least two persons involved in a conversation, and that while it is nice that the sender tries to make an effort to address a person the proper way, the recipient should also not take it bad when someone from far away uses the wrong name, and don t make a fuss about it. That s called tolerance. To give an example that is not about names, but about such tolerance, President Obama recently made a visit to the Japanese Emperor, and bowed before him. If you are living in the US, you probably heard about that, because the media there made a fuss about the US president bowing. It so appears that by japanese standards, he indeed did bow too deeply. But the japanese didn t care much. He s not japanese, he doesn t have the cultural background, and therefore can be wrong. At least he tried. What actually made news in Japan is the US news making a fuss about it.

30 December 2009

Christian Perrier: About properly using people's names...

I recently tried to improve my way to interact with people by mail, in my free software work. Particularly, my intent is to be "better" in using other people names and specific politeness rules. As many of my readers may guess, being involved in internationalization means interacting with people of different cultures. And, when it comes at names, this is just a nightmare..:-) Most so-called "westerners" (western of what, by the way?) are used to the common tradition we share to use people's "first" name....at first...followed by what is most often the "family" name (the one we usually get from our parents). As a consequence, it is fairly easy for me to guess that, interacting with someone named "Barack Obama", I can use "Dear Barack" if I'm in position to use his first name and "Mr Obama" if I need to show some respect distance whatever. Also, as most "western" names are quite familiar in my ears (international culture, blah blah), I can easily guess what is a first name and what is a family name (though, here, "Barack" is probably not the best example). Gender may become a little bit trickier in several cases, but, thankfully, in English, "Dear" does not change with gender (but the third person does whic sometimes leads to problems). The problem arises when interacting with many other culturally different people such as my friends in Japan, China, India, Africa, etc. Here, dammit, the habits might vary a lot and things get harder. Should I call my friend "Kenshi Muto" as "Dear Kenshi", "Kenshi-san", "Muto-san" or whatever? From my readings, I see that most Japanese people do put their family name at first. So, I should then call him "Dear Muto" if I'm very close to him (oh, maybe it's 'her', by the way, who knows?)...or maybe "Kenshi-sensei" because he (oh...or she) is a respected figure in the Japanese FLOSS community...or whatever. Damn! Thankfully, I know Kenshi for years, we're good friends and I know that he's using the "western" way to write his name. I also know he's a man : after 5 or 6 Debconfs, you know everything about people! But, of course, it becomes harder when it comes at people I never had contacts before.....and I don't want to appear as impolite, or silly so, then we jump into my daily "nightmare". Using Wikipedia for hints about Chinese, Indian (the many ones) or even Icelandic or Indigenous peoples of the Americas helps a lot, still. I can only encourage my various friends in free software to do the same. We probably all deeply appreciate when someone shows some knowledge of our culture or at least tries to do his her best to understand our culture. That is probably also part of the mutual enrichment we get in our free software activities. As a tribute for this, I now write my own name as "Christian PERRIER" in my email headers, so that people have a slightly better clue that "Perrier" is my family name and that someone who wants to be familiar with me should call me "Dear Christian". I can probably ncourage my friends all around the world to do the same. For once, using capitals is not about 'shouting' but more about helping other people to figure things out. Next blog writing about the interesting challenge we all face in free software meetings and conferences: shake hands, kiss, hug or just wave? :-)

25 December 2009

Clint Adams: Distributed shell scripts for Christmas

When being told about the differences between Puppet and Chef by Puppet fans, a few common talking points emerged. They included the terms DSL , declarative , and shell script . Shell script was probably the most entertaining meme, and referred to how, without dependencies, Chef was just like writing shell scripts in Ruby. In actuality, a Chef cookbook appears to be roughly 17 files in 7 different directories. Most of them end in .rb, but there is also a metadata.json to keep the metadata.rb company, and perhaps an .rdoc if you like that sort of thing. I have no idea who writes shell scripts this way. I am also stupefied that people say this is easier than Puppet, because I doubt I would want to perform system administration by writing one of these things. So when I started writing my own thing, I contemplated the dependency issue, and for a few minutes decided to be lazy and leave them out entirely. Once it dawned on me, however, that I was then writing shell scripts in Lua, I became ashamed. If I were going to go that route, why not just set up a git repository with a bunch of shell scripts, and set up cronjobs on each of the clients to do a git pull and run these shell scripts as root? After all, nothing beats shell scripting for shell scripting, not Perl, not Python, not Ruby, and least of all Lua. So I wrote a dependency resolver. It was easier than I had anticipated and I have vague plans to make it smarter than Puppet's. Then I'm justified in sticking to my Lua DSL . Now Steve has a list of requirements that seem to be relatively mild. I think he could easily get away with a VCS-shellscript-cron setup. The VCS pull can be tunneled over ssh or stunnel or anything else which will provide authentication and encryption, so there is no need for a fancy custom server with its own certificate authority. In short, all the tools are there and you just need glue. I will continue to pretend that I'll need more complex logic and power that only Lua can give me, so I'll end up doing VCS-Lua-cron until I change my mind.

12 December 2009

Russell Coker: US Border Security

Making Light has a post about the Canadian sci-fi author Peter Watts who was beaten and jailed overnight without access to a lawyer by US border guards because he asked what they were doing [1]. Apparently one is supposed to cringe in fear whenever questioned by authority in the US, so much for land of the free . In 12 hours time I will hopefully have got past the security police and be boarding a flight out of the US and it will be a great relief. On a practical note, if al Quaeda was a serious threat, if anyone really cared to stop the importation of drugs, of if any of the other reasons for having security on borders were taken seriously then this sort of thing really wouldn t help to achieve such goals. One of the purposes of a justice system is to encourage cooperation from the population. If a suspect will be treated fairly and considered to be innocent until proven guilty then there is no reason not to report suspicious people to the police. If however a suspect will be summarily beaten and denied access to a lawyer then no decent person can make a police report unless they are certain of the suspect s guilt beyond all reasonable doubt. When Barack Obama was elected the majority of the world s population was greatly relieved, we expected some significant changes in the way things are run. It doesn t seem that he is living up to our expectations.

12 November 2009

Russell Coker: Links November 2009

Credit Writedowns has a populist interpretation of the latest Boom-Bust cycle [1]. It s an interesting analysis of the way the US economy is working. Bono writes for the NY Times about Rebranding America [2]. He praises Barack Obama suggesting a different reason to believe that the peace prize is deserved and describes what he believes to be the world s hope for the US. IsMyBlogWorking.com is a useful site that analyses your blog [3]. It gives some advice on how to improve some things as well as links to feed validation sites. Evgeny Morozov gave an interesting TED talk How the Net Aids Dictatorships [4]. I don t agree with his conclusion, he has some evidence to support his claims but I think that a large part of that is due to people not using the Internet well. I expect things to improve. The one claim that was particularly weak was when he mentioned radio stations in Rwanda as an example of technology being used for bad purposes the entire point about the first-world discussion about such things is the radio vs the Internet. Ray Anderson gave an inspiring talk about The Business Logic of Sustainability [5]. He transformed his carpet company, decreasing it s environmental impact by 82% and it s impact per volume of product by more than 90% while also significantly increasing it s profitability. He says that corporate managers who don t protect the environment should be regarded as criminals. Making his company more environmentally friendly reduced expenses (through efficiency), attracted more skillful employees, and attracted environmentally aware customers. Managers who don t follow Ray s example are not only doing the wrong thing for the environment, they are doing the wrong thing for their stockholders! Ray s company Flor takes carpet orders over the web [6]. They won t ship a catalogue outside the US, so presumably they only sell carpet to the US too. Marc Koska gave an interesting TED talk about a new syringe design that prevents re-use [7]. His main aim is to prevent the spread of AIDS in the developing world where even hospital staff knowingly reuse syringes. It will also do some good in developed countries that try to prohibit drug use. David Logan gave an interesting TED talk about tribal leadership [8]. His use of the word tribe seems rather different from most other uses, and I am a bit dubious about some of his points. But it is definitely a talk worth seeing and considering. Deirdre Walker is a recently retired Assistant Chief of Police who has worked for 24 years as a police officer, she describes in detail her analysis of the flaws in the TSA security checks at US airports [9]. Brian Krebs wrote an article for the Washington Post recommending that Linux Live CDs be used for Internet banking [10]. Windows trojans have been used to take over bank accounts that were accessed by security tokens, that could only be accessed by certain IP addresses, and that required two people to login. It seems that nothing less than a Linux system that is solely used for banking is adequate when a lot of money is at stake. The NY Times has an interesting review of the book Ayn Rand and the World She Made [11]. It seems that Ayn was even madder than I thought. Gary Murphy has written an interesting analysis of the latest stage in the collapse of the US Republican party [12]. The ABC (AU) Law Report has an interesting article about Evony s (of China and the US) attempting to sue Bruce Everiss (of the UK) in Australia [13]. The Guardian has an insightful article about the IEA making bogus claims about the remaining oil reserves [14]. It seems that the experts who work for the IEA estimate that oil is running out rapidly while the US is forcing them to claim otherwise. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has written an interesting article about the economic effects of the war in Iraq [15]. Apparently it caused the loss of over 2,000,000 jobs considerably more than the job losses that could ever result from efforts to combat global warming.

29 October 2009

Gunnar Wolf: Lovin' it in Afghanistan

Lovin' it in Afghanistan
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to travel to Colombia, where I delivered a talk at III Encuentro Internacional de Seguridad Inform tica in the city of Manizales (photos available, of course. I travelled with Colombia's nacional airline, Avianca. On completely unrelated news, today I entered Avianca's website to check my miles. To my biggest amusement Turns out I am now a resident of Bamiyan, Afghanistan! (I swear I didn't select that) Seems they do beard-based georeferentiation?
NP: Hey, mister Taliban, tally me bananas
daylight come and me wanna go home!

25 October 2009

Biella Coleman: Branding Politics, Branding Change

Brands are most often associated with the world of crass consumerism but they can play a key role in fomenting political change. Or so claim some pretty clever thinkers and activists and they will be giving talk about the importance of branding for democratic politics, this Monday at 7 PM, at the Change You Want to See
Please join us this Monday, October 26th as we continue our series on Symbols, Branding and Persuasion with an exploration of branding in the context of electoral and legislative politics. We ll start with a presentation by media theorist Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the forthcoming Branding the New Deal. Afterward Jessica Teal, design manager for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign will join Duncombe for a conversation via video skype. Like it or not, propaganda and mass persuasion are part of modern democratic politics. Many progressives today have an adverse reaction to propaganda: ours is a politics based in reason and rationality, not symbols and fantasy. Given our last administration s fondness for selling fantasies as reality, this aversion to branding, marketing and propaganda is understandable. But it is also na ve. Mass persuasion is a necessary part of democratic politics, the real issue is what ethics it embodies and which values it expresses. Looking critically at how the Roosevelt Administration tried to brand the New Deal and how the Obama campaign leveraged principles of marketing and advertising gives us an opportunity to think about different models of political persuasion.

Biella Coleman: Branding Politics, Branding Change

Brands are most often associated with the world of crass consumerism but they can play a key role in fomenting political change. Or so claim some pretty clever thinkers and activists and they will be giving talk about the importance of branding for democratic politics, this Monday at 7 PM, at the Change You Want to See
Please join us this Monday, October 26th as we continue our series on Symbols, Branding and Persuasion with an exploration of branding in the context of electoral and legislative politics. We ll start with a presentation by media theorist Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the forthcoming Branding the New Deal. Afterward Jessica Teal, design manager for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign will join Duncombe for a conversation via video skype. Like it or not, propaganda and mass persuasion are part of modern democratic politics. Many progressives today have an adverse reaction to propaganda: ours is a politics based in reason and rationality, not symbols and fantasy. Given our last administration s fondness for selling fantasies as reality, this aversion to branding, marketing and propaganda is understandable. But it is also na ve. Mass persuasion is a necessary part of democratic politics, the real issue is what ethics it embodies and which values it expresses. Looking critically at how the Roosevelt Administration tried to brand the New Deal and how the Obama campaign leveraged principles of marketing and advertising gives us an opportunity to think about different models of political persuasion.

17 October 2009

Russell Coker: Links October 2009

Garik Israelian gave an interesting TED talk about spectrography of stars and SETI [1]. He assumes that tectonic activity is a pre-requisite for the evolution of life (when discussing the search for elements that are needed for life) and that life which is based on solar energy will have a similar spectrographic signature to the chlorophyl based plants that we are familiar with. I doubt both those assumptions, but I still found the talk very interesting and I learned a lot. Julian Dibbell wrote an interesting Wired article about an ongoing battle between the Cult of Scientology and 4chan [2]. I don t often barrack for 4chan, but they seem to be doing some good things here but of course they do it in their own unique manner. The article also links to a hilarious video of Tom Cruise being insane, among other things he claims that Scientologists are only ones who can help at an accident site. Has Tom Cruise ever provided assistance at a car crash? The Independent has an article by Robert Fisk about the impending shift away from the US dollar for the oil trade [3]. This is expected to cause a significant loss in the value of the US dollar. Robin Marantz Henig wrote an interesting article for the NY Times about the causes of anxiety [4]. It focusses on Jerome Kagan s longitudal studies of babies and young people. One thing that I found particularly interesting were the research issues of recognising the difference between brain states, internal emotional state, and the symptoms of emotions that people display (including their own description of their emotions which may be misleading or false). The tests on teenage social interactions that involved fake myspace pages and an MRI were also interesting. Juan Cole wrote an insightful Salon article titled The top ten things you didn t know about Iran [5]. The Iranian government doesn t seem to be a threat to anyone outside their country. Clay Shirky wrote an insightful post about TV being a heat-sink for excess spare time and considers the number of projects of the scale of Wikipedia could be created with a small portion of that time [6]. It seems that the trend in society is to spend less time watching TV and more time doing creative things. In a related note Dan Meyer has an interesting blog post about trolls who say You Have No Life [7]. The Making Light blog post about Barack Obama s Nobel Peace Prize has some insightful comments [8]. I doubted that he had achieved enough to deserve it, but the commentators provide evidence that he has achieved a lot. I wonder if he will receive a second Peace Prize sometime in the next 10 years. The Making Light blog post about bullies and online disputes predictably got diverted to discussion school bullying [9]. The comments are interesting. Making Light has a mind-boggling post about homosexuality and porn [10]. US Senator Tom Coburn s (R-OK) chief of staff Michael Schwartz made the case against pornography. All pornography is homosexual pornography , said Schwartz, quoting an ex-gay friend of his. Among other things there are many good puns in the comments. Cubicle Jungle is an amusing satire of the computer industry [11]. It s shocking how long it goes before it gets to the part that s obviously fiction. The WikiReader is an interesting new device [12]. It costs $99US and has a copy of Wikipedia on an SD card, they have a subscription service that involves posting you a new SD card every 6 months, or you can download an image from their server. They state that they have a filtered version of Wikipedia for children, I wonder how they manage that, I also wonder whether they have an unfiltered version for adults. The device runs on two AAA batteries and is designed to be cheap and easy. Naturally it doesn t support editing, but most of the time that you need Wikipedia you don t need edit access or access to content that is less than 6 months old. Exetel are scum, customers who complain are cut off [13]. Making Light has an interesting post about a New Age scumbag who killed at least two of the victims who paid $10,000 for a sweat-lodge workshop (others are in hospital and may die in the near future) [14]. The NY Times has an interesting article about Jamie Oliver and his latest project [15]. He is trying to reform the eating habits of the unhealthiest area in the US. The 15 pound burger sounds interesting though, I wouldn t mind sharing one of those with 14 friends

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Dianne Reeves: Strings Attached at the CSO

Another trio concert at CSO, but very different from the most recent classic piano trio. Tonight was once again a chance to see Dianne Reeves (wikipedia) but this time accompanied simply by two guitarists: Russell Malone and Romero Lubambo (wikipedia). Given that Dianne Reeves (who we had seen in just a few month earlier in our neighbourgood) has plenty of stage presence, the format made for a more intimate concert yet with plenty of groove at times too. The three had been touring in Europe for 25 shows, and it was a really nice performance and a great way to end the week. Recommend if you can catch them somewere.

10 October 2009

Jaldhar Vyas: Barack Obama is a Keynesian

pointless award I haven't written about politics since the election for several reasons. First and foremost, Obama won fair and square. While I might wish the other guy had won, I can't whine and pout or threaten to move to Canada like some people. The vox populi chose and that choice has to be respected. Secondly, one of the worst aspects of the current American political scene is the paranoid obsession with personalities in which the president is not just an implementor of policies good or bad, but personally responsible for the entire state of the cosmos. It started with Nixon, started getting alarming with Clinton and reached batshit levels of insanity with George W. Bush. But just because the left does it it, doesn't mean we have to follow suit. Although I figured Obamas policies would end up a trainwreck, I wanted to see what he actually did before calling him on it. The Nobel comittee isn't hoping and changing with me. In a decison that is bizarre even by the lax standards of a prize that long since jumped the shark, the President is to receive the Nobel Peace prize for...not being George Bush? It's difficult to see what substantive reasons they could have for their choice. But apparently one of these days he is going to make extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples...democracy and human rights are to be strengthened. Well let's see now: Perhaps I am being a little unfair in not taking into consideration all the great things the president is going to do real soon now. It's just that I'm worried that this might be an attempt to sway him in the task of winning the war in Afghanistan (and more likely than not carrying it into Iran and Pakistan.) I take solace in the knowledge that heretofore Obama has shown a refreshing inclination to throw people under the bus when they are no longer convenient. If he can do that to the guy who says he wrote his book than some silly Norwegians won't be a problem.

27 September 2009

John Goerzen: How To Record High-Definition MythTV Files to DVD or Blu-Ray

I ve long had a problem. Back on January 20, I took the day off work to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama. I saved the HD video recordings MythTV made of the day (off the ATSC broadcast), intending to eventually save them somehow. I hadn t quite figured out how until recently, so there they sat: 9 hours of video taking up about 60GB of space on my disk. MythTV includes a program called mytharchive that will helpfully transcode your files and burn a DVD from them. But it helpfully will transcode the beautiful 1920 1080i down to DVD resolution of on a good day 720 480. I couldn t have that. Background My playback devices might be a PC, the MythTV, or the PlayStation 3. Of these, I figured the PS3 was going to be hardest to accommodate. ATSC (HD) broadcasts in the United States are an MPEG Transport Stream (TS). Things are a bit complicated, because there may be errors in the TS due to reception problems, the resolution and aspect ratio may change multiple times (for instance, down to SD for certain commercials). And, I learned that some ATSC broadcasts are actually 1920 1088 because the vertical resolution has to be a multiple of a certain number, and those bottom 8 pixels shouldn t be displayed. Adding to the complexity, one file was 7 hours of video and about 50GB itself. I was going to have to do quite some splitting to get it onto 4.7GB DVD+Rs. I also didn t want to re-encode any video, both for quality and for time reasons. Attempts So, I set out to try and figure out how to do this. My first approach was the sledgehammer one: split(1). split takes a large file and splits it on byte or line boundaries. It has no knowledge of MPEG files, so it may split them in the middle of frames. I figured that, worst case, I could always use cat to reassemble the file later. Surprisingly, both mplayer and xine could play back any of these files, but the PS3 would only play back the first part. I remembered this as an option if all else failed. Next, I tried avidemux. Quite the capable program and I thought I could use it to cut my file into DVD-sized bits. But I couldn t get it to let me copy the valid MPEG TS into another MPEG TS it kept complaining of incompatible formats, but wouldn t tell me in what way they were incompatible. I could get it to transcode to MPEG4, and produce a result that worked on the PS3, but that wasn t really what I was after. Then, I tried mpgsplit. Didn t recognize the MPEG TS as a valid file, and even when I used a different tool to convert to MPEG PS, acted all suspicious as if it bought the MPEG from a shady character on a grungy street corner. dvbcut I eventually wound up using dvbcut to split up the ATSC (DVB) recordings. It understood the files natively and did exactly what I wanted. Well, *almost* exactly what I wanted. It has no command-line interface and didn t have a way to split by filesize, but I calculated that about 35 minutes of the NBC broadcast and 56 minutes of the PBS broadcast could fit on a single DVD+R. It worked very, very nicely. The resulting files tested out well on both the PS3 and the Linux box. So after that, I wrote up an index.txt file to add to each disc and a little shell scripting later and I had a directory for each disc. I started burning them with growisofs. Discs 1 and 2 burned well, but then I got an error like this:
File disc06/VIDEO/0930-inaug-ksnw-06.mpg is larger than 4GiB-1.
-allow-limited-size was not specified. There is no way do represent this file size. Aborting.
 Eeeeepp. So apparently the ISO 9660 filesystem can t represent files bigger than 4GB. My files on disc 1 had represented multiple different programs, and stayed under that limit; and disc 2 s file was surprisingly just a few KB short. But the rest of them weren t. I didn t want to have to go back and re-split the data to be under 4GB. I also didn t want to waste 700MB per disc, or to have to make someone change video files every 15 minutes. So I decided to investigate UDF, the filesystem behind Blu-Ray discs. mkisofs couldn t make a pure UDF, only a hybrid 9660/UDF disc that risked compatibility issues with big files. There is a mkudffs, but it doesn t take a directory of its own. So I wrote a script to do it. Note that this script may fail with dotfiles or files with spaces in them: 
#!/bin/bash
set -e
if [ ! -d "$1" -o -e "$2" -o -z "$2" ]; then
   echo "Syntax: $0 srcdir destimage [volid]"
   echo "destimage must not exist"
   exit 5
fi
if [ " id -u " != "0" ]; then
   echo "This program must run as root."
fi
EXTRAARGS=""
if [ ! -z "$3" ]; then
   EXTRAARGS="--vid=$3"
fi
# Get capacities at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD+R as of 9/27/2009
SECSIZE=2048
# I'm going to set it a few lower, than capacity 2295104 just in case.
# Must be at least one lower than the actual size for dd to do its thing.
# SECTORS=2295103
SECTORS=2295000
echo "Allocating image..."
dd if=/dev/zero "of=$2" bs=2048 "seek=$SECTORS" count=1
echo "Creating filesystem..."
mkudffs --blocksize=2048 $EXTRAARGS "$2"
mkdir "$2.mnt"
echo "Populating..."
mount -o rw,loop -t udf "$2" "$2.mnt"
cp -rvi "$1/"* "$2.mnt/"
echo "Unounting..."
umount "$2.mnt"
rmdir "$2.mnt"
echo "Done."
That was loosely based on a script I found on the Arch Linux site. But I didn t like the original script, because it tried to do too much, wasted tons of time writing out 4.7GB of NULLs when it could have created a sparse file in an instant, and was interactive. So there you have it. HD broadcast to playable on PS3, losslessly. Note that this info will also work equally well if you have a Bluray drive.

18 September 2009

Clint Adams: From Hudson to Middlesex

We need to get Jaldhar a video-editing station and some free phase vocoder software.

24 March 2009

Adeodato Sim : Multa por dar de comer a las palomas

Marga escribe una entrada sobre las palomas de ciudad. Cuenta la historia de c mo erradicaron las palomas de Trafalgar Square en Londres una vez prohibieron dar de comer a estos animales. En Alicante tambi n est prohibido alimentar a las palomas. Hay unos signos en grande que as lo anuncian, so pena de multa de 601,01 euros. Este curioso n mero da cuenta de que la prohibici n ya lleva algunos a os con nosotros: la multa ya exist a cuando a n us bamos pesetas, y era por entonces de 100.000 pesetas. Que, escrupulosamente traducidas a euros, son 601,01.

14 March 2009

Clint Adams: Ooh, a puzzle!

Riddle: Totus illae has venio pro , quod is mos totus venio iterum Answer: All they /h s/ I come for , because he custom all I come again

28 February 2009

Uwe Hermann: Teeworlds - a fun, fast-paced, open-source, online multiplayer shooter

Teeworlds CTF screenshot I have no idea how such a great open-source game as Teeworlds has been able to exist without me hearing about it until recently. Teeworlds is a fast-paced realtime multiplayer shooter. You control a small "Tee" which can hold various weapons (hammer, gun, shotgun, laser-rifle, rocket launcher, ninja-sword) while running and jumping around frantically on the map, trying to frag as many other Tees as you can before you're killed by some other guy. Easy, eh? Teeworlds server list screenshot There's are many game servers to choose from, as well as various game modes (death match, team death match, capfure the flag and some unofficial "mods"). You can join servers on the Internet, or create your own server, be it a public one or a LAN server. Installation Usually I would suggest apt-get install teeworlds, but for now the packages in unstable are an older 0.4.x version, whereas upstream released a much-improved 0.5.1 version. I have already filed a bug and I'm optimistic there'll be a new version in unstable soon. In the mean-time however, you can manually build the game from source via: 
 $ apt-get install zlib-dev libsdl1.2-dev
   (maybe also libgl, libglu, and python, if not already installed)
 $ wget 'http://teeworlds.com/trac/bam/browser/releases/bam-0.2.0.zip?format=raw' -O bam-0.2.0.zip
 $ wget http://teeworlds.com/files/teeworlds-0.5.1-src.zip
 $ unzip bam-0.2.0.zip
 $ unzip teeworlds-0.5.1-src.zip
 $ cd bam-0.2.0
 $ ./make_unix.sh
 $ cd ../teeworlds-0.5.1-src
 $ ../bam-0.2.0/src/bam release
Teeworlds stats screenshot Running the game 
 $ ./teeworlds
You'll obviously need a working OpenGL/DRI setup (check if "glxinfo grep direct" says "Yes"), otherwise the game will be way too slow. In case you experience graphics glitches and distortions, first exit the game, then: 
 $ vi ~/.teeworlds/settings.cfg
Change the "gfx_noclip 0" option there to "gfx_noclip 1" and restart the game. Teeworlds DM screenshot Firewalls If you use a local firewall as I do, you need to open at least ports 8300-8303 (UDP), even better 8300-8310 for more choice in game servers: 
 $ iptables -A OUTPUT -m state --state NEW -p udp --dport 8300:8310 -j ACCEPT
Further resources Have fun!

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