We recently bought a Canon Vixia HG20 camcorder. The HG20 records in AVCHD format (MPEG-4 h.264) at up to 1920 1080. To get from the camcorder to a DVD (or something we can upload to the web), I need some sort of video editing software. This lets me trim out the boring bits, encode the video for DVD, etc. Background In addition to DVD creation and web uploading, I want the ability to burn high-definition video discs. 1920 1080 is significantly higher resolution than you get from a DVD. There are two main ways to go: a blu-ray format disc, or an AVCHD disc. A blu-ray disc has to be burned onto BD-R media, which costs about $5 each, using a blu-ray burner, which costs about $200. AVCHD discs use the same h.264 encoding that the camcorder does, meaning they have better compression and can be burned onto regular DVD+R media, fitting about 30 minutes onto a DVD. Moreover, it is possible to move AVCHD files directly from a camcorder to an AVCHD disc without re-encoding, resulting in higher quality and lower playing time. The nicer blu-ray players, such as the PS3, can play AVCHD discs. AVCHD seems pretty clearly the direction the industry is moving. Compared to the tape-based HDV, ACVHD has higher quality with lower bitrates, better resolution, and much greater convenience. Hard disk or SD-based AVCHD camcorders are pretty competitive in terms of price by now too, often cheaper than tape-based ones. The downside of AVCHD is that it takes more CPU power to process. Though as video tasks are often done in batch, that wouldn t have to be a huge downside. The bigger problem is that, though all the major video editing software claims to support AVCHD, nobody really supports it well yet. The Contenders Back when I got my first camcorder in about 2001 the one that I m replacing now you pretty much had to have a Mac to do any sort of reasonable consumer or prosumer-level video editing. We bought our first iMac back then to work with that, and it did work well with the MiniDV camera. Today, there s a lot more competition out there. The Mac software stack has not really maintained its lead some would even say that it s regressed and the extremely high cost of buying a Mac capable of working with AVCHD, plus Final Cut Express, makes that option completely out of the question for me. It would be roughly $2500. Nobody really supports AVCHD well yet, even on the Mac. Although most programs advertise support of smart rendering a technique that lets the software merely copy unchanged footage when outputting to the same format as the input none of them have smart rendering that actually works with AVCHD source material. Though this fact is never documented, though discussed on forums. Another annoyance, having used Final Cut Express in the past, is that with these programs you can t just go to the timeline and say delete everything between 1:35 and 3:52 ; you have to go in and split up clips, then select and delete them. They seem to be way too concerned about dealing with individual clips. I briefly used Cinelerra on Linux to do some video editing. It s a very powerful program, but geared at people that are far more immersed in video editing than I. For my needs, it didn t have enough automation and crashed too much and that was with MiniDV footage. It apparently does support AVCHD, but I haven t tried it. I ve tried three programs and considered trying a fourth. Here are my experiences: Ulead/Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 Commonly referenced as the go to program for video editing on Windows, I started with downloading the Free Trial of it from Corel. Corel claims that the free trial is full-featured all over on their website, but I could tell almost instantly that it wasn t. I wound up buying the full version, which came to about $65 after various discounts. I wanted to like this program. Its output options include AVCHD disc, Blu-ray disc, DVD+R, and the like. Its input options include MiniDV, AVCHD, ripping from DVD, ripping from Bluray, and just about every other format you can think of. And it heavily advertised proxy editing , designed to let you edit a scaled-down version of AVCHD video with a low-CPU machine, but refer back to the original high-quality footage for the output. It didn t pan out that way. The biggest problem was the constant crashing. I really do mean constant. It probably crashed on me two dozen times in an hour. If you are thinking that means that it crashes pretty much as soon as I can get it re-opened, you d be correct. Click the Play button and it hangs. Click a clip and it hangs. Do anything and it hangs. It did seem to work better with the parts of the source that had been converted to a low-res version with Smart Proxy, though it didn t eliminate the hangs, just reduced them. And every time I d have to End Task, it would forget what it had already converted via Smart Proxy even if I had recently saved the project and have to start over from scratch. I spent some time trying to figure out why it always thought my project was 720 480 even when it was 1920 1080, and why the project properties box didn t even have an option for 1920 1080. After some forum searching, it turns out that the project properties box is totally irrelevant to the program. Yay for good design, anyone? VideoStudio Pro X2 does have good output options, allowing combination of multiple source files onto a single DVD or AVCHD disc as separate titles. Unfortunately, its DVD/AVCHD rendering process also yes hangs more often than not. The documentation for VideoStudio Pro X2 is of the useless variety. It s the sort of thing that feels like it s saying The trim tool is for trimming your clips without telling you what trimming your clips means, or making it obvious how to remove material from the middle of a clip. The proxy editing feature isn t what it should be either. Instead of being something that just automatically happens and Works in the background, you have to manage its queue in the foreground and it forgets what it was doing whenever the program hangs. On the rare occasion when pressing Play did not cause a hang, the AVCHD footage played back at about 0.5fps far, far worse than PowerDirector manages on the same machine. Bits that had been rendered for proxy editing did appear to play at full framerate. I have applied for a refund for this purchase from Corel under their 30-day return policy, and have already uninstalled it from my disk. What a waste. CyberLink PowerDirector 7 Ultra This was the second program I tried, and the one I eventually bought. Its feature set is not quite as nice as Corel s, especially when it comes to versatility of output options. On the other hand, it feels done. It only crashed two or three times on me apparently that s GOOD on Windows? Things just worked. It appears to have proxy editing support, but it is completely transparent and plays back with a decent framerate even without it. It can output to AVCHD, Bluray, and DVD, though smart rendering doesn t work with AVCHD source material. Its weakness compared to the Corel package is that it doesn t have as many options for formatting these discs. You can have only one title on a disc, though you can have many chapters. You have some, but not much, control over compression parameters. The same goes for exporting files for upload to the web or saving on your disk. The documentation is polished and useful for the basics, though not extensive. Overall, this package works, supports all the basics I wanted from it, so I m using it for now. Adobe Premiere Elements 7 I downloaded the trial of this one too. I opened it up, and up popped a dialog box asking what resolution my project would be, interlacing settings, etc. I thought YES now that s the kind of program I want. As I tried out the interface, I kept thinking the same. This was a program not just for newbies, but for people that wanted a bit more control. Until it came to the question of output. Premiere Elements 7 was the only package I looked at that had no option to burn an AVCHD disc. DVD or Blu-ray only. That s a deal-breaker for me. There s no excuse for a program in this price range to not support the only affordable HD disc option out there. So I didn t investigate very much farther. Another annoying thing is that Adobe seems to treat all of their software as a commercial. I m a user, not an audience, dammit. I do not want to buy some photoshop.net subscription when I buy a video editing program. I do not want to see ads for stuff when I m reading PDFs. LEAVE ME ALONE, ADOBE. I just felt sleazy even giving them my email address, let alone installing the program on my system. I think I will feel like a better person once I reboot into Windows and wipe it off my system. Pinnacle Studio 12 Another program that comes highly rated. But I never installed it because its minimum system requirements state that it needs an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz or higher for 1920 1080 AVCHD editing. And I have only a Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz half the computing horsepower that it wants. And since they offer no free trial, I didn t bother even trying it, especially since PowerDirector got by fine with my CPU. Conclusions This seems to be a field where we can say all video editing software sucks; some just suck a little less. I m using PowerDirector for now, but all of the above programs should have new versions coming out this year, and I will be keeping a close eye to see if any of them stop being so bad.

It is funny the way things work out when you're looking for help. Recently I was working on a Ruby + FUSE based filesystem and as part of the development I added simple diagnostic output via trivial code such as this:

@debug && puts "called foo(# param );"

That was adequate for minimal interactive use, but not so good for real live use. In real live use I started outputing messages to a dedicated logfile, but in practise became overwhelmed by thousands of lines of output describing everything ever applied to the filesystem. I figured the natural solution was to have a ring-buffer. (Everybody knows what a ringbuffer is, right?) It could keep the last 500 messages and newer debug information would just replace older entreis. That'd be just enough to be useful if I had a problem, but not so overwhelming it would get ignored. In Perl I found a nice ringbuffer library, but for Ruby nothing. Locking a region of shared memory via shmget, shmset and keeping an array of a few hunded strings would be simple, but it seems odd I have to code this myself. I started searching around and I accidentally stumbled upon the unrelated IPC::DirQueue perl module. Not useful for my ringbuffer logging problem, but beautifully useful. There is no package for Debian but that was easily created:

dh-make-perl --build --cpan IPC::DirQueue

Already I have a million and one uses for it - not least to solve my problem of maintaining a centralised quarantine for all the spam mail rejected by N MX machines. (Which currently uses a combination of rsync and lockfiles.) This is the reason why sites like Perl Advent Calendar are useful - they introduce a useful module every day or two, and introduce you to thinks that you can use in the future. Of course keeping a sustainable site like that up and running is hard which is why sites like debaday struggle to attract contributors, for example. Anyway random happyness. ObFilm: Lord of the rings: Two Towers

Welcome, Congress, to our generation s electric sun. Earlier, I had posted the Wikileaks link to these congressional reports with comments of my own but I thought I would pen down a few thoughts as I finally electronically leafed through some of them. These reports remind me a little bit of another set of reports that are publicly available, which are the Congressional Quarterly reports, which are an excellent resource for research. They are a bit dry but provide a wealth of information and perhaps more important, citations to law cases, journalist articles, and academic pieces (everything that journalistic pieces, in other words, do not do). It does 1/2 the research for you, as I like to think. The few reports I have scanned from the leaks remind me, in fact, of the CQ reports, in content, style and tone. And while I thought CQ reports published on a wide range of topics, these semi-private reports are far more extensive in terms of topics and far more specific as well:

CRS: Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Overview and Issues, December 10, 2008
CRS: FDA s Authority to Ensure That Drugs Prescribed to Children Are Safe and Effective, December 2, 2008
CRS: African American Members of the United States Congress: 1870-2008, December 4, 2008
CRS: The Pigford Case: USDA Settlement of a Discrimination Suit by Black Farmers, January 13, 2009
CRS: Selected Legal and Policy Issues Related to Coalbed Methane Development, March 9, 2004

I look forward to hearing/learning more about how they are used (I can t imagine that each report is read by many) and why exactly they were hidden away as they don t seem to be the type of information that should be kept classified.

Welcome, Congress, to our generation s electric sun. Earlier, I had posted the Wikileaks link to these congressional reports with comments of my own but I thought I would pen down a few thoughts as I finally electronically leafed through some of them. These reports remind me a little bit of another set of reports that are publicly available, which are the Congressional Quarterly reports, which are an excellent resource for research. They are a bit dry but provide a wealth of information and perhaps more important, citations to law cases, journalist articles, and academic pieces (everything that journalistic pieces, in other words, do not do). It does 1/2 the research for you, as I like to think. The few reports I have scanned from the leaks remind me, in fact, of the CQ reports, in content, style and tone. And while I thought CQ reports published on a wide range of topics, these semi-private reports are far more extensive in terms of topics and far more specific as well:

CRS: Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Overview and Issues, December 10, 2008
CRS: FDA s Authority to Ensure That Drugs Prescribed to Children Are Safe and Effective, December 2, 2008
CRS: African American Members of the United States Congress: 1870-2008, December 4, 2008
CRS: The Pigford Case: USDA Settlement of a Discrimination Suit by Black Farmers, January 13, 2009
CRS: Selected Legal and Policy Issues Related to Coalbed Methane Development, March 9, 2004

I look forward to hearing/learning more about how they are used (I can t imagine that each report is read by many) and why exactly they were hidden away as they don t seem to be the type of information that should be kept classified.

Thanks to the hard work of Tim Abbott and the FTP masters, Sage can now be found in the unstable repository. Tim deserves a whole bunch of kudos for his determination in getting Sage into Debian it involved a lot of working with upstream to resolve a variety of problems that made life difficult for packagers, and, as far as I can tell, a non-trivial amount of time. My involvement in the job was fairly minimal just reviewing and uploading. There are still a few issues with the packaging that are being worked out with upstream for the next version before sagemath can migrate into testing (after Lenny, of course), but the package should be at least functional. If you were looking to give Sage a try before but gave up because it wasn t in Debian, now s your chance to check it out! (The same goes if you re interested in free mathematics software but hadn t heard of Sage before.)

This year I managed to go to fosdem every day, even at the beer event. Not that I attended many talks: I was quite busy getting the network to work. We got wireless in almost all locations in the end. Setting up and fixing the problems took most of Saturday. On Sunday we added the final 'experimental' room via a wireless bridge link across the square, with the beam over the heads of the people in the queue for Belgian fries.

In the end it all worked and we had only a few configuration and many cable problems. I must say it was more for to 'work' at fosdem then to just be there. May thanks to Jerome Paquay who actually arranged to lend the equipment from our employer (Cisco) and to configure it. Thanks for AY for ... well being AY.

Next year n-mode? serious uplinks?

As you may know I maintain a Creative Commons licensed photoblog at my website. I'm also cross-posting some of the better photos to my flickr page. Even with my humble, and not really widely-known little photoblog, you can already see the Creative Commons license's effects on media sharing and remixing/reusing kick in. Quite a number of my photos have already been used by other people for various different purposes (blogs posts, articles, even album covers), including some of the "bigger" sites such as the Wall Street Journal Blog or Cult of Mac... Here's the list of places I know of where my photos are used. Please leave a comment if you spot more of them in the wild. I intend to keep this list updated as more of my photos appear elsewhere. (Oh, and I have no idea why people seem to be so obsessed with my "Sugar" photo...) Sugar

• Wallstreet Journal Blog: A Clue for Tumor Survival Lies in How Sweet It Is (blog post)
• Discover Magazine: Blood Sugar Surges May Be Responsible for Senior Moments (article)
• Dear Mark: Sugar Cravings (blog post)
• VentnorBlog: Today is World Diabetes Day (blog post)
• EcoSalon: What Does That Bargain Really Cost? What It Takes to Make 10 Everyday Items (blog post)
• Paradox 365: The sugar cubes (riddle)
• Married to Fitness: Sweeteners Are Everywhere: Look Out for Hidden Sugars! (blog post)
• Charting the Course To Better Health Care (blog post) dead link
• creativecommons.org: CC Q&A and the joy of being reused (blog post)

Clock

• Angel Ortega: Dispersoul 1 (album cover)

Autumn Leaf

• The music of J.D. Warrick: GOING, A. THE LEAVING (album cover)

Scissors

• 20somethingfinance: Is your 401k Match Being Cut? This May be your Hint to Find a New Job (article)

Soccer World Championship 2006

• Nicht nur in China versteht man kein Englisch... (blog post)
• ununun.de: Zu viel des Guten (blog post)

Organized

• Context is King: Organized (blog post)

Dandelion

• Herbal Healthcare: Dandelion (blog post)

Intel Celeron CPU

• Cult of Mac: Intel Unveils Lower-cost Mobile Core 2 Quad (article)

Smoke

• Carbon Trading: Australian Targets Loom (blog post)

Sun and trees

• Let's Read and Find Out!: The sky, the sun, the stars (blog post)

POSIX.1g

• Nyfiken Vital: Nya funktioner och tj nster i Nyfiken vital (blog post)

The phrase "Total Fire Ban" is bandied around a lot these days -- mostly on days with high temperatures, low humidity, and high winds. To me, it isn't a particularly hard concept to understand, either: in the immortal words of Metallica, "Fire bad, Aircon goood!". And yet, some people just don't seem to get it. This afternoon, my brigade got a page for a fire call to a reported "smoking log" behind town. When we got to where the log was, indeed, smoking, it was obvious that a group of people had had a large party around a bonfire last night. Given the prevalence of large-scale fire incidents at the moment, anyone who feels that lighting up a bonfire, cracking open a large quantity of alcohol, and then leaving the damn fire going in the morning, is a good idea, really needs to have their head examined. In other firefighting-related news, despite being the on-call brigade for our district this week, we've not been called to assist at any of the fires currently burning both to our north and south. It's frustrating that having been trained to fight bushfires, and with so many areas currently needing some serious firefighting, my district isn't getting asked to help out. On the other hand, they don't appear to be hurting for resources at these fires (with several hundred RFS personnel, not to mention NSWFB and NPWS people, at the Peats Ridge fire; also, some 200 RFS personnel have been dispatched to Victoria), so it's good to know that there's plenty of bush firefighting volunteers around if things get bad around here.

I ve been working on a redundant wireless network for a client. The network has two sites that have pairs of links (primary and backup) which have dedicated wireless hardware (not 802.11 and some proprietary controller in the device - it s not an interface for a Linux box). When I first started work the devices were configured in a fully bridged mode, so I decided to use Linux Bridging (with brctl) to bridge an Ethernet port connected to the LAN with only one of the two wireless devices. The remote end had a Linux box that would bridge both the wireless devices at it s end (there were four separate end-points as the primary and backup links were entirely independent). This meant of course that packets would go over the active link and then return via the inactive link, but needless data transfer on the unused link didn t cause any problems. The wireless devices claimed to implement bridging but didn t implement STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) and they munged every packet to have the MAC address of the wireless device (unlike a Linux bridge which preserves the MAC address). The lack of STP meant that the devices couldn t be connected at both ends. They also only forwarded IP packets so I couldn t use STP implementations in Linux hosts or switches to prevent loops. Below (in the part of this post which shouldn t be in the RSS feed) I have included the script I wrote to manage a failover bridge. It pings the router at the other end when the primary link is in use, if it can t reach it then it removes the Ethernet device that corresponds to the primary link and adds the device related to the secondary link. I had an hourly cron job that would flip it back to the primary link if it was on the secondary. I ended up not using this in production because there were other some routers on the network which couldn t cope with a MAC address changing and needed a reboot after such changes (even waiting 15 minutes didn t result in the new MAC being reliably detected). So I m posting it here for the benefit of anyone who is interested.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict;
use Sys::Syslog;
use POSIX; my $cfg_file = "/etc/bridged.cfg";
my $daemon = 1; openlog("bridged", "pid cons", "local1") or die "openlog"; if($ARGV[0] and $ARGV[0] eq "-d")

$daemon = 0;
open(CFG, "<" . $cfg_file) or die "Can't read \"$cfg_file\".";
my %cfg = ( SLEEP => '30',
PING_INTERVAL => '3',
PING_COUNT => '3',

);
while(<CFG>)

chomp;
if($_ =~ /^#/ or length($_) == 0) next;
my ($name, $val) = split(/ *= */);
$name =~ s/ \t*$//;
$val =~ s/^ \t*//;
$cfg $name = $val;

close(CFG); system("ifconfig $cfg IF1 up");
system("brctl addif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 ");
system("brctl setpathcost $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 25");
system("brctl delif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF2 down"); my $route1 = 1; if($daemon == 1)

my $rc = fork();
if($rc > 0)

# parent
exit(0);
if($rc != 0)

error("Can't fork.");
POSIX::setsid();
my $pidfile = "/var/run/bridged.pid";
open(PID, ">" . $pidfile) or error("Can't open $pidfile.");
print PID getpid() . "\n" or error("Can't write to $pidfile.");
close(PID); open(STDIN, "</dev/null") or error("Can't open /dev/null.");
open(STDOUT, ">/dev/null") or error("Can't open /dev/null.");
open(STDERR, ">/dev/null") or error("Can't open /dev/null.");

syslog("info", "starting up, 60 second delay");
sleep(60);
syslog("info", "now running"); sub ping_host

my $ip = shift;
open(CMD, "ping -i $cfg PING_INTERVAL -c $cfg PING_COUNT $ip sed -n \"/transmitted/s/^.*\\([0-9].*\\).received.*\$/\\1/p\" ");
my $count = <CMD>;
close(CMD);
if($count == 0)

syslog("err", "Host $ip can't be pinged");

return $count;
while(sleep($cfg SLEEP ))

if($route1)

unlink("$cfg SIGNAL ");
if(ping_host($cfg PING1 ) == 0)

system("ifconfig $cfg IF2 up");
system("brctl addif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 ");
system("brctl setpathcost $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 50");
system("brctl delif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF1 down");
syslog("warning", "Interface $cfg IF1 is broken, using interface $cfg IF2 ");
$route1 = 0;


else

if(stat("$cfg SIGNAL "))

unlink("$cfg SIGNAL ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF1 up");
system("brctl addif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 ");
system("brctl setpathcost $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 25");
system("brctl delif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF2 down");
syslog("warning", "Interface $cfg IF1 is considered to be fixed");
sleep(60);
$route1 = 1;

In case anyone's interested, here are some notes on the ASUS Eee Box, more specifically the b202 model, Linux edition:

• I use the box as a media center, so I initially wanted to connect it to my 720p HDTV using a DVI/HDMI cable. Unfortunately it's apparently impossible to use the TV's native screen resolution (1360x768) via HDMI, the best you can get is 1280x720, which results in a somewhat blurry image. Worst yet, the HDMI input has an overscan problem, approximately 50 pixels on each side are missing... which means that your GNOME panels will be invisible. I'm not sure if this is caused by the Eee Box or by my TV set but if you absolutely want HDMI, waiting for the b204/b206 model with its built-in HDMI might be a good idea. (In the end, I used my TV's VGA input.)
• It's more powerful than I thought. The Linux version ships with a 160GB SATA hard drive and 2GB of RAM (instead of 1GB for the Windows version) and the Atom N270 CPU is pretty fast. It plays 720p MPEG4 video (such as this file) with lots of CPU to spare, and the quality is really great.
• The optical S/PDIF audio output doesn't work under Linux, as far as I can tell.
• It's extremely silent despite the fan and hard drive.
• The Gigabit Ethernet controller is a nice touch, netperf reports a speed of 611 MBits/s. In practice the drive's speed will be the bottleneck, of course.
• To avoid tearing issues when playing video with Xv, use the Intel Video Overlay adaptor instead of the (default) Textured Video adaptor. (Use xvinfo to get the port number.)
• OpenGL performance isn't great; Compiz with basic effects will run fine, mplayer can play most video files using the gl/gl2 output without frameloss, but games will be slow. (Not that I expected much from the Intel GMA950 anyway...)

All in all I'm pretty happy with the Eee Box. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

A new version of openMSX has been released!

Important new feature is save-states. This gave me the means to finally finish the very first game I bought as a kid: Konami's Nemesis 2 for the MSX computer.

In these times games were usually hard. Nemesis 2 is even harder. The only way to play it without save-states is not dying all 15 levels. Given that Nemesis 2 is a shooter this is VERY hard :)


Each one of those red bullets and grey stones is fatal :)

But save-states wasn't enough. I also enabled "old-people" mode, meaning running the emulator at 75% speed of the original MSX computer.

After more then an hour of hard labour playing using alot of save-states I finally managed to finish the game.

Only 22 years late ;-)

P.S.: I checked with my MSX friends and no-one was able to finish this game without some form of cheating....

Yes, it is an empty file! I have just upgraded xorg to the experimental packages. hal does its job, and all devices are automatically detected and configured.
This is actually a great improvement, especially for those who had to fight against the XFree86 configuration file just to get a graphical session working, back in the late 90 s.

The only thing I had to do is creating an /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi file with the following contents, so that GDM has a correct keyboard layout (French in my case):

I was browsing GitHub, getting to know the system and feeling pretty amazed by it (seriously I felt I discovered Orkut for developers)... when some thought just stroke me: how do they save space? Yes, I know git is pretty efficient when it comes to saving space. Yes, I also know that space are becoming cheaper with time, but still, they claim to have +50k developers hooked up their servers if they re not doing something about space, things will go inefficient quite quickly. Rails alone seems to have 464 forks! If all of them represent one bare clone of the canonical repository on GitHub s side, that is a lot of space wasted in duplicated things Git has one amazing feature: hashing the objects it keeps track of. It surely doesn t seem too complicated to design a schema that avoids having two copies of objects with the same hash. So all those forks of Rails, on GitHub s side, would be just hardlinks to the canonical repository Surely people working in GitHub are smart enough to have though about it on their own Who knows? Maybe that s exactly what they re doing already! If so, can I ask them to share their schema, since it can become very useful to the rest of us? If not, can we beat them ;-D?

Everybody seems to be using git these days I am not very found of hypes , as I told you before, but there s been some time I ve been evaluating git. I was happy with svk for quite a long time Lately, though, I ve been developing and extending a lot of ruby libraries, and all of them seem to be hosted at GitHub and using git So, why not give it a serious try? I chose a simple task on my TODO-list: to extend xmpp4r-simple to support XMPP PubSub, so I could use it in an internal project at my company. So I cloned its git repo and started developing. Not a really hard task, since all I had to do was use the underlying library (xmpp4r not surprisingly also in GitHub) and mimic what Blaine s done for the callbacks and it was ready (and working although I still need to put more time on the test suite). I am still exploring It will take some time to migrate my stuff (and maybe a lot will remain in my company s Subversion), but that s what git-svn is for, isn t it? Right now I am looking for ways to work with git-buildpackage and Debian git tools Do you have some advice on that?

I'm really happy with my new Dell precision M6400.
The only thing most people complain about is the size of the power brick, and I can't agree more. It's a huge 200 Watt thing and it's really as large and heavy as a stone brick.

Luckily I still have a spare power brick of my old Dell precision M65: a 90 Watt PA-10 family power brick. It has exactly the same voltage (19.5 Volt) so I decided to try it.
I've been using it now for a few days when at customer sites and it works fine.

(Try at your own risk!)

This is a giant rant with a small point at the end. So be warned. Earlier this week, I booted up Windows for the first time in a few months. About 2 minutes after it came up, just after I had started up an app, it informed me that it desperately needed to restart because it had applied some updates, and unless I clicked cancel, it would. So I restarted. The Saga Begins Then I opened up the program for my negative scanner. This device has an infrared dust-detection system that is not well supported in SANE. I can insert a 6-frame negative, it will load it in, identify where the 6 frames are, and scan it at 4000 DPI. So anyhow, I opened it up and started scanning. Surprisingly, it was REALLY SLOW. Normally it takes about 3 minutes per frame, and I could tell it wasn t going to do that. It sounded as if the computer couldn t keep up with the scanner. I tried to get Windows to tell me if it was talking to the scanner at USB 2.0 speeds, but this information was nowhere to be found. So I went down under my desk and moved some USB devices to different ports. Got back up from under the desk, and: BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH was there. Reboot. Scanner now works at normal speed. So I started it scanning, then went off to watch the Purdue game with Terah. Came back a little while later, expecting it to be ready for the next negative, only to manage to catch it in the nick of time before it helpfully rebooted my machine again due to yes more updates. So I saved, rebooted, and finally scanning worked after that. Also I disabled automatic installation of updates. A Turn For The Worse A few days later, I was getting expecting a new camcorder, and I was planning to use Windows for video editing. Originally, my hard disk had Windows, a Windows emergency recovery partition, and Linux on it. When I upgraded my motherboard and added a SATA HDD, I moved almost all of Linux to it. So there was now a lot of free space on that original drive, and the recovery partition is useless with the new motherboard anyhow. So I figure: delete that recovery partition, and expand the NTFS partition to take up the whole of the disk. Easy enough, right? So I do this, and much to my annoyance, Windows now refused to boot. It would just hang. No boot menu, no splash screen. Just hang. Linux saw and could access the NTFS partition just fine. So I went hunting for my XP install CD. Finally found it. Boot off the thing. It spends 5 minutes loading drivers for all sorts of things I don t have off the CD, then promptly crashes, saying inaccessible boot device. A hunch or two later and I m twiddling bits in the BIOS to try to get it to see my SATA DVD burner properly. No luck. I finally download the drivers for my chipset from Gigabyte, have to use Wine to extract them, then scrounge up a working floppy to put them on. Reboot. Blue screen again but a different one. Twiddle some more bits in the BIOS. Reboot. Success! Recovery console is mine! I run chkdsk, and fixboot, which everybody in the forums says will fix this. Neither made any difference at all, but the recovery console could see the NTFS partition just fine. Grumble. More googling, and I try testdisk for Linux. It twiddled some bits on the NTFS boot sector and my partition table. Reboot. And UGH. Now Linux won t even boot and Grub won t start. Download Debian live CD. Boot from it. Inspect disk with fdisk. Turns out testdisk just renumbered my partitions. Restore the previous numbering: Windows on partition 2, Linux /boot on partition 5. Save, reboot. Grub is back. Linux boots. Try Windows. And . Still hangs, but this time only after saying that HAL.DLL is missing or corrupt. Reboot into Linux. HAL.DLL is right there where it should be, and at the size it should be. Ponder this for a bit. I then tried looking at boot.ini. On a lark, I wondered if deleting the recovery partition meant that boot.ini no longer considers Windows to be partition 2, even though that s what the partition table says. Change it to partition 1, save. Reboot. SUCCESS IS MINE! WINDOWS BOOTS! Only 4 hours after expanding its partition. I told some friends about this trouble booting. What on earth did you do, John? I expanded the NTFS partition. And the response: Ahh. That ll do it. Expanding a partition is something we do routinely on Linux. Even on running production servers. Even WHILE THEY RE RUNNING. And I never have a problem like this. And even if I did, I wouldn t have to use some tool written FOR A DIFFERENT OS to fix it. Argh. The Problems Multiply A few days later, I got a new Canon Vixia HG20 camcorder. It shoots in AVCHD format 1920 1280@60i, h.264, which is a standard format for hard disk or SD card HD camcorders. I needed some basic video editing software that would let me do simple edits and burn a BDMV or AVCHD disc onto DVD+R formats that Blu-ray players can play, yet are cheap to make. After poking around, I decided to download the free trial of Ulead/Corel VideoStudio Pro X2. The free trial supposedly was the full version of the program, though it quite obviously wasn t after installing it. So I bought the full version and was greeted by about an 800MB download instead of the 120MB full version free trial download. Now here s the thing about VideoStudio Pro X2. IT S CRAP. It has crashed on me at least two dozen times, usually when I click the Play button. Its interface is really clunky. There s no way to mark a start and an end point, and say just delete everything between there, regardless of what clips they re in. The AVCHD disc creator wants to re-encode the entire project, even though it s ALREADY IN AVCHD. Though you can work around that by exporting the entire project to an AVCHD *FILE* which is smart enough not to re-encode it then making a disc from that. The project properties likes to say I m editing 720 480 even when I m editing 1920 1080, and doesn t even have a box for 1920 1080. Though after some Googling, it turns out that the project properties settings are irrelevant anyway. Yay for good design? So after all this crashing, I went out and did some more Googling. I found this lovely quote:

In short, every application I and our Labs tester tried iMovie, Pinnacle Studio, Ulead Video Studio, Sony Vegas and Avid Liquid at best could open but barely play some clips, and more often simply hung or crashed.

So what we have here is a whole culture of mediocrity. Everybody advertises that they work with AVCHD, yet nobody actually WORKS with AVCHD. And this is the format that the industry is rapidly moving to for HD HDV s days are quite numbered.

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

Its getting close to valentines day again so I thought some of you geeks out there would appreciate a post I made last november about a hack that was inspired by an XKCD comic. Anyhow here is a link to the original post titled Roses are #ff0000 , hope you enjoy it as much as I did.