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| Clean Sheet Redesign | |
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Date: 19/5/2005 | There are 2 types of programmers, those that lean towards incremental change and those that lean towards radical redesign. I fall fairly much in the incremental camp and have done so for a long time. For a long time (4 years?) have needed to make substantial architectural changes to an application I've written and for the sake of incremental change not bothered fixing certain "dead ends" in the design that I'd discovered. I tried redesigning it at least 3 times and then bringing those designs to life in code. And failed. 3 times. I have a few insights into why these redesigns failed that I'd like to share.
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| ハウルの動く城 | |
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Date: 13/5/2005 | Does anyone know when ハウルの動く城 (1, 2) will come out on DVD somewhere in the world? Or possibly in theatres in Australia?
I am not going to watch a cam captured divx/xvid version of it and ruin it for myself... :{ But the waiting just goes on and on. I emailed MadMan who have brought other Studio Ghibli movies to Australia and they said "this year" for theatre release (no DVD eta). Well it's May. I guess "this year" means December. |
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| Gmail Tutorial | |
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Date: 12/5/2005 | To stem the tide of Gmail users emailing me about setting up Scribe to access Gmail via POP3 I've written a short Gmail tutorial. If you have any additions / corrections or comments on the tutorial let me know and I'll update it. Any troubleshooting you had to do would also be useful to collect into one place for new users. Thanks.
As far as I know Gmail doesn't support SMTP as well for sending mail so don't ask about that. Happy Gmailing! :) |
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| Video Encoding | |
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Date: 3/5/2005 | We seem to have run out of VHS tapes at home and the machine is dying anyway so last night when I needed to record some tv (not for me) I installed the TV card drivers again and played around with the encoding settings. I have a Leadtek Tv2000 which is a basic PCI TV tuner card and it works Ok I guess. Despite it saying that it supports MPEG4 in hardware don't believe it.
The bundled PVR/record/view software 'Winfast PVR' is a mix of good and bad, firstly it gives you a functional UI to setup channels, setup encoding options and capture video. It does 'skin' everything but it looks hideous. However 15 minutes in to my hour long capture it crashed. So stability is not good enough for everyday use. Oh and you do get a hardware remote and IR receiver with it but it only worked for the first few days I had it and then died. No amount of fiddling with drivers and new batteries would resurrect it. After recording the show I had a go at optimizing the encoding settings, because the default use of MPEG2 was a) eating all the CPU and dropping frames/audio and b) creating 2gb files for less than an hour of video. So I started by dropping the MPEG2 bitrate down to 4000, and it looked terrible. So I started exploring the other codecs. The most obvious one to try was DivX 5. So I made some test encodings, and at full rez (PAL: 720 x 576) it would drop frames badly, as the CPU (1.4ghz Athlon) would by pegged at 100%. So I tried half res (which is still watchable for TV) and it would sit around the 90% CPU mark. However when the scene pans around it has blocky artifacts which are very noticable even with the bitrate ramped up to 4000. So I kept looking and the next thing to try was Xvid. With half res video and Xvid's quality rating set to about 3.5 the output video was very watchable with only very slight video artifacts and the CPU would average about 85% load. Very nice! I checked the output avi with GSpot and it told me the file was 90% audio?!?! What the? Ok so the audio compression was set to "ogg" (my fravorite format) but according to the filesize it seems like it was actually PCM (uncompressed). So I switched to mp3 encoding for the audio and wow... the output capture files are now tiny! I'm encoding at about 250-300mb an hour, with very watchable picture quality and decent audio. Most people expect to get about 1gig/hr. So I'm doing way better than that. When playing back these Xvid/mp3 avi files back it uses about 20% of the CPU, nice in of itself, but it does mean that I can't encode and playback reliably on my current setup (85+20 = 105%). So no Xvid PVR for me. At least until I upgrade. Now what I need to find is a reliable capture and PVR application that I can hook into a tv guide to auto record shows of interest. That search is still ongoing. The WinFast PVR software is a) too unreliable and b) can't be scripted to record shows, their schedule file is a binary .DAT thing (grrr!). I'm hoping that some freeware app can do good video capture off a TV card... any suggestions? |
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| Tiger | |
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Date: 2/5/2005 | I've been reading up on Apple's new version of OS X 'Tiger' and it's pretty much heading directly where I wanted linux to go. With a full OpenGL implementation of the GUI for maximum hardware acceleration. Powerful OS level API's for graphics, sound and data. Visually beautiful UI - Aqua. Support for lots of multimedia add-ons via firewire and usb2. Top level authoring capabilities.
And linux has X windows. Wow I'm so overwhelmed. ;) To me it doesn't seem like it's a matter of 'if' I'll jump on the Mac bandwagon but rather 'when'. I doubt that a Mac Mini will really give Tiger room to stretch it's legs. According to some it wants a ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce FX to run Quartz 2D Extreme, a feature which I think I'd appreciate. So from my limited research into which Mac would suit me (a free one hehehe) it seems the iMac G5 17" @ 1.8 Ghz + 512mb RAM would be a minimum hardware platform for decent performance in Tiger (right?). A mere A$ 2,520 at my local Apple retailer. Which is quite a bit more than a dual Opteron upgrade for the existing machine. *sigh* But I think the Mac has a really rosy future with a disproportionately high level of mindshare in the geek community. |
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| Rise Of The Machines | |
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Date: 22/4/2005 | After yesterday's spike of website hits I thought I'd look into where that was comming from, and no referer spiked up to explain it. But the number of "bots" hitting the site had gone up to some 30% of the page loads on www.memecode.com, and I don't know about you, but thats er kinda high isn't it?
I've starting tracking the bots by counting their hits per useragent string. And obviously Googlebot and Msnbot are leading the race early on but I suspect a rouge bot 'telnet0.1 noone@example.org' is responsible for yesterday's spike. I have in the past banned IP's due to the shear number of incomming hits for no apparent reason. Then of course Googlebot itself decided to hit my site over 61000 times in a 24 hr period some time ago now. Is it just me, or does 30% of your site traffic being eaten away by bots just annoy you? On a somewhat related note, I've also instituted a kill file for porn / scam sites that spam my referer log to help boost their Google ranking. I might add that I've also set my robots.txt file to stop scanning of the stats anyway, so even if you evade the kill file you won't receive any benifit from getting listed as a referer. I suspect that these sites are inserting themselves as the referer by infecting machines with spyware that frigs with IE's outgoing referer field thus littering the web's stats pages with their URL, which in turn makes their Google ranking grow. But I have no conclusive evidence that happens, but it's my current theory. |
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