A Man and his Penguin

Can you believe it? I finally encoded some video to play flawlessly on the Sony Walkman NWZ-S61 series!

But oh god, what a torturous route. In the end, I finally figured out that the version of FFMPEG I had was at fault. Upgrading to the latest development version through SVN fixed the problems.

Here is the command necessary to encode video onto the Sony Walkman, when you have a recent FFMPEG:

ffmpeg -i input -b 567k -s 320×240 -vcodec mpeg4 -ab 220k -ar 44100 -acodec libfaac output.mp4

This is the command necessary to configure the new ffmpeg:

./configure –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-liba52 –enable-libfaac –enable-libfaad –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libogg –enable-libtheora –enable-libvorbis –enable-libx264 –enable-libxvid

(you need development libraries for each of the –enable-lib* items there -  liba52-dev, libfaac-dev, etc. All are available in the Ubuntu Feisty repos.

If, when running FFMPEG, you encounter an error message about "try compiling with gcc 4.2, ignore it. Trying to fiddle around will only result in breaking your ability to compile!

My ambition is to release a GUI video converting tool before Sony, and then add features to it later. I will be assisted by the use of a new monitor, that I will be buying tomorrow (as my old CRT has been giving me the sheets, flickering and turning white and stuff like that).

But yeah, it’s now time for me to encode a video onto my Sony Walkman!

I’m getting REAL close to having working video on my Sony MP3 walkman.

I decided to ditch the GUI frontends and delve into the not-so-difficult world of FFMPEG on the command-line. This FFMPEG command creates working video, but stuttering audio:

ffmpeg -i (infile) -b 500 -s 320×240 -vcodec mpeg4 -ab 128 -acodec aac outfile.mp4

I believe it’s because this command will create audio at 48 kilohertz sample rate if you feed in a VOB file (raw DVD video, which I was), that was causing stuttering audio. If you add -ar 44100 before the -ab argument, that should fix it. I’m just copying over the new file right now, and I’ll test it.

EDIT: Same problem occurring. This time I’m trying completely different settings. I don’t care about finding out what the exact fault is (I don’t have time to encode all these videos many times!), I just want to find an incantation that works so I can write a GUI frontend.

I am currently trying this command:

ffmpeg -i (infile) -b 576 -s 320×240 -vcodec h264 -ab 128 -ar 41000 -acodec aac outfile.m4v

So, I’ve changed the video codec to h264, the bitrate to something a little more round (in computing terms, 576 is more round than 500 - it’s a math thing), and the container format to m4v. Right now the actual bitrate is climbing to above 768kbps, which is non-supported by the player; we’ll see if the MP3 player will play it regardless.

It’s a bit different, it’s a bit unusual, but I do like the new Spice Girls song Headlines. I was initially disappointed that the former Fan Network hadn’t managed to get a copy of the song and put it on the internet - well, they actually did. I gave my former colleagues too little credit. I have just listened to a low quality version on Youtube, and I do definitely like the song.

Don’t get me wrong - lyrically, it’s a little bit weak. But it’s got a nice feel to it - sort of a cross between the Spice Girls of old, and "Let Love Lead The Way" (the only good song ever produced by Darkchild).

I just wrote "Who produced Headlines anyway?", then it occurred to me to go onto Wikipedia to look it up. And guess what? Richard Stannard and Matt Rowe produced it! For those who don’t know, that duo produced most of the Girls’ hits. Thank god the Spiceys have seen the light and hired Stannard and Rowe once again. And this explains the slight R&B feel, as Matt Rowe did a lot of R&B tracks.

In the first iteration of this post, I criticised Rodney Jerkins and co for ruining the Spice Girls’ third album. But I deleted all that part of the post, as I don’t think it’s fair to have a go at someone whose career and possibly LIFE has been completely ruined by the events in question.

It’s a bit different, it’s a bit unusual, but I do like the new Spice Girls song Headlines. I was initially disappointed that the former Fan Network hadn’t managed to get a copy of the song and put it on the internet - well, they actually did. I gave my former colleagues too little credit. I have just listened to a low quality version on Youtube, and I do definitely like the song.

Don’t get me wrong - lyrically, it’s a little bit weak. But it’s got a nice feel to it - sort of a cross between the Spice Girls of old, and "Let Love Lead The Way" (the only good song ever produced by Darkchild).

I just wrote "Who produced Headlines anyway?", then it occurred to me to go onto Wikipedia to look it up. And guess what? Richard Stannard and Matt Rowe produced it! For those who don’t know, that duo produced most of the Girls’ hits. Thank god the Spiceys have seen the light and hired Stannard and Rowe once again. And this explains the slight R&B feel, as Matt Rowe did a lot of R&B tracks.

In the first iteration of this post, I criticised Rodney Jerkins and co for ruining the Spice Girls’ third album. But I deleted all that part of the post, as I don’t think it’s fair to have a go at someone whose career and possibly LIFE has been completely ruined by the events in question.

Once you get some proper ID3 tags into the MP3 player (I was right, you put the album covers into the files themselves), it works really well. I’m amazed by the bass response, and especially by the speed of the player. When you turn it off, it actually goes into a low-power standby mode for 24 hours. During that 24 hours, if you turn it on, it instantly starts playing the music, video or slide show. Instantly. At the exact place you stopped it. As if all you did was paused it.

The one thing I have yet to work out is ripping a DVD straight into the proper MPEG-4 format. I tried using K9Copy yesterday, but it didn’t work in the player. Gnome says the file K9Copy created was DivX, which the MP3 player doesn’t support; but I thought DivX was just MPEG-4 anyway.

I’m using Acidrip at the moment to try again.

I also put some photos onto the MP3 player. One of the ones I put on was of Sun Park from Hi-5, taken by my friend Niel. I realised last night that Sun actually is a cutie!

EDIT: Acidrip looks like it’s humming along nicely; the video is at the correct resolution and the sound is synced. Gnome says it’s FFMPEG MPEG-4, which looks correct.

I am listening to "You Can’t Stop The Beat" on my new Sony MP3 player. I guess this is an initial review, but I created an inverse pyramid on the equaliser, using Sony’s ClearBass technology. I am very impressed with the bass response. I’m getting a very loud bass, but without the distortion that you would get with any other MP3 players.

I have four gripes with the MP3 player so far:

1. There’s a lanyard included (in the packing box, not the product box) but I can’t seem to get the lanyard into the little hole on the player!

2. For some reason, some of my MP3s are coming onto the player as "Unknown Artist". Maybe the MP3 player only recognises older styles of ID3 tag.

3. I downloaded the covers of Hairspray and another album from Amazon.com and put them into the same directories as the albums, but the MP3 player hasn’t automatically picked up on them. I might need to do something else, or (here’s a possible explanation) it picks up the cover image from the actual tag.

4. The USB port on the MP3 player is completely non-standard, so you need to use the included cable.

Here’s what I already love about the Sony MP3 player:

1. Drag ‘n’ Drop. Works out-of-the-box on Linux. You can’t get much better than that.

2. The ClearBass makes a huge difference.

3. The reported playback time of 33 hours for music and 9 hours for video. That’s hell impressive.

4. The interface and the visual effects in it are nice. I especially like the screensaver, which fades in and out every so often.

5. The thing comes on INSTANTLY if you’ve used it in the past 24 hours, and goes right back to the exact place you were (even in videos!)

Probably more later once I have had a good play with the player.

Science fiction writers theorise that if a computer becomes super powerful and learns enough information, it will become self-aware and start attempting to communicate with us.

Well, Storm isn’t quite at that level yet :-)  But it is speaking. The latest round of Storm-sent spam attempts to inflate the price of EXTO shares by… wait for it… SPEAKING to you in an almost incomprehensible voice. Or rather, it sends you an MP3 file of this speech.

Are these files pre-made and distributed to the botnet? Or are they generated by the botnet’s computers on-the-fly? I have downloaded two samples of them, which have the same content, and their MD5 sums don’t match. So they aren’t exactly the same file. I don’t know if someone has changed the ID3 tags or something on purpose, though.

I’ll end this post by saying "I don’t have to worry about it" as I’m using Linux, which doesn’t get this infection; and here is a rather worrying article from TrendLabs Malware Blog about the future of Storm.

Storm in Segments

October 17th, 2007 by Mayee Corpin

It
is said that change is the one constant in life, and it is proving true
in the case of the Storm malware. Usually, change is good, but where
the said malware is involved, change may mean another thing.

The infamous Storm worm has gotten an update, with the giant botnet
that it employs now broken into segments, or smaller networks. The
latest Storm variants now use a 40-byte key to encrypt traffic over the
peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol Overnet, as first reported by our
counterparts in SecureWorks. Overnet aids singular bots to connect to
other infected systems. Using encryption means that communication is
only possible between botnet nodes that are using the same key.

This may be an indication that the Storm worm creators are set to go
to market with Storm variants, which they could sell in malware forums
to other malicious users (spammers or DoS attackers). This could
translate to automated spam kits, which could in turn lead to a
skyrocketing of Storm infections.

Another reason could be for the Storm authors to more easily manage
their networks. The upside could be that system administrators
themselves may now be able to better protect their networks
against the deluge of the Storm malware, whereas before the Storm
botnet was believed difficult to eliminate because of its use of P2P
technology (instead of a single C&C server).

The Storm worm began its downpour in January this year, earning its
name for its social engineering technique of squatting on the
real-world Kyrill storm that was then ravaging Northern Europe. It
first sent out spammed email messages that promised more information
about the said storm. Users ended up downloading a Trojan that rendered
their machines zombies, part of the Storm botnet that is now estimated
at 1-50 million PCs.

Since then, the botnet has been constantly evolving, employing one
new technique after another. More notably, it came as eCard spam that
rode on big occasions like Fourth of July, Labor Day, and the NFL
season; contained links that supposedly led to a YouTube video file;
offered downloads of the otherwise legitimate application Tor Proxy or
a BETA testing program; and posed as “welcome” messages for memberships
to various online services. Most recently, it was seen as a worm that
came via fake eCards meant for unsuspecting users with a fondness for felines.

There is still no end in sight to the twists and turns in the
history of the Storm worm. But if this new development works in the
Storm authors’ favor, this malware family is poised to devolve into a
cyclone, with said creators bringing more damage to property and
earning in the process. For now, the coast is yet unclear.

This morning, I did the Big Walk 2007.

The new Esplanade Station makes it so convenient! Rather than get off at Perth Station and then walk all the way down to the Perth Esplanade, I just stayed on the train and it delivered me to the Esplanade :-)  This year the start was in the Supreme Court Gardens, due to some sort of building work.

The actual turnout seemed to be down from previous years, probably due to the dark clouds in the sky earlier on. Unfortunately, the instructors doing the warmup were pretty clueless as to what sort of aerobics constitutes a good warmup, and there was only a halfhearted attempt at stretching. Most of the crowd didn’t pay any attention anyway. I had to do my own stretching.

Like always, people started leaving for Fremantle before the actual start of the event, but this year they left even earlier. One of the Rotarians was telling people that they could leave straight after they registered - dumb!

Although there were clouds, there was no rain, and the weather wasn’t too hot or too cold. Good walking weather, without much wind. There was plenty of water on the way, and the Rotarians were even handing out sweets for energy. Once again there was visible support from local community organisations for the Big Walk, with a band playing at one of the schools along the route (though when I got to it, they were just noodling around in between songs).

But yeah, the walk was quite nice. I hadn’t trained up for the walk this year; by the time I got to Cottesloe, I was really quite sore. I had managed to keep a reasonable pace going, but by the time there was 1 km left I realised that the time was 2:45! Only 15 minutes to go to complete the walk in a good time! It wasn’t at all clear if I was going to make it, even though I upped the pace to my maximum; but then finally I rounded the corner to the Esplanade with 2 minutes to spare.

So, I beat my Personal Best for the Big Walk, by 1 minute!

I wasn’t too impressed with the prize giveaways. Usually, the announcer says "The first two people to me wearing/holding abc gets xyz prize" or something like that, and so if you qualify you have to rush up toward the stage. This year, the guy from 94.5 was pretty much just saying "The first 3 kids to me get xyz", and then he was just throwing prizes across the field to anyone who could catch them. Once he’d done that for a few minutes, he got fed up and just told all the kids to come up to the table and take whatever they wanted. That was a major disappointment - I was hoping to get some sort of prize this year!

The person who won the car wasn’t there at the field when it was drawn. They almost never are!

I spent about another hour in Fremantle, getting some food, looking around the markets and shops and stuff. I sat down in one place with my lunch, and a busker was nearby - he wasn’t very good, but I stuck around, and once I finished my lunch I had listened to 3 songs. I decided that, since I had listened to him sing 3 songs, I should pay him whatever it costs to buy 3 songs on iTunes. So I gave him $5.

Then I walked to the other end of the mall thingy, where there was another busker, who was absolutely TERRIBLE.

Not a lot else ensued. I went back to Perth on the train, walked what felt like a kilometre and down a large flight of stairs to change from the Midland platform to the Clarkson line under William Street. Surely they could have built those platforms closer to the main Perth station!

Once I got back to my car, I drove to the shops and bought myself some gingerbread ice-cream. Yum!

Due to other things, which I don’t feel comfortable talking about here, this evening I started to feel frustrated. I feel like a particular person skipped out on me without giving me an answer to my question. When you do the Big Walk, you do it with the knowledge that it will eventually end. What this situation amounts to is starting on a walk without knowing how long I’ll be walking, and the kilometre markers are simply mirages which vanish as you get up closer to them. As you get up to an official to ask how much further you have to walk, they merely wave into the distance and grunt.

I just had a look to see if the new Spice Girls single was available online yet (no? Where’s the famous Spice Fan Network when you need it?), and a headline caught my eye.

Thursday 11th October, 2007. "Westlife: There’s no war with Spice Girls".

Waddawhat? Aren’t they reporting that story about 7 years too late? As it turns out, no. In a startling coincidence, Westlife and the Spice Girls are both releasing albums on the 7th anniversary of their bitter chart war. Apparently, the Girls have now moved the release date of their album to avoid a war. They must be remembering that they came off second-best last time.

Kian Egan from Westlife described the Spice Girls as "running scared" (dickhead) and described Mel C as "not having anything nice to say about anybody" (stating the obvious). Mel C says that she’s "now a fan" of the Spice Girls. A bad-weather fan, obviously; since back when she actually had a solo career she was anything BUT a fan of the SGs. Now that her entire solo career consists of some second-rate songs and about 50 fans in Denmark, she’s the world’s biggest fan of the Girls.

Yesterday I sent a "Feature Enhancement" proposal for Ubuntu’s AppArmour package, that only text editors should be allowed to edit the .bashrc file. Today, the feature enhancement request was denied - apparently it would still be easy for a malicious program to add to this file by using a command like:

vi -c ‘r sneaky.sh’ -c wq ~/.bashrc

Which demonstrates why all Linux users should learn Vi

Oh well; I guess if you’re still worried about attacks against sudo, you could put your .bashrc file as writable only by a separate user account which is limited to merely reading and writing this file. An attacker might still be able to get around this by replacing the file - I should probably test this.

I went into the city today, under the guise of "I want to look in Borders bookshop" but really to see the new train stations. I wasn’t terribly impressed. The Esplanade station is just a boring hole in the ground, and the sign which says how long until the next train is completely inaccurate. (It stayed at "5 minutes" for about 5 minutes, before going to 3 minutes, 1 minute, back to 5 minutes, then the train came and it switched to 1 minute).

The William Street platforms of Perth Station aren’t too bad, except that there are no rubbish bins. Thankfully, there was a cleaner passing by who I could give my rubbish to. There’s a nifty set of lights on the wall of the station which change colour depending on what angle you are looking at them from; cool!  I bought a Smartrider for $10 in Perth, and already saved $1:40 from using it to get around.

I did go to Borders, and was amazed that there was not a single CD or DVD of Mylene Farmer. There were only two Linux-related books I was interested in - one specifically about Ubuntu which was like a softcover bible ($65) and another called Linux and the Unix Doctrine (or something like that) which was surprisingly interesting, but it was pretty short and cost a worrying $85! No way!

I ended off buying a Zydeco album and a humourous book called "How To Survive A Robot Uprising".

I had lunch at MacDonalds. I ordered the Lean Beef Burger combo. It took forever to come, and in the end the burger itself was tiny. Ripped off! The edges of the beef were tough, as well. It rained heavily while I was in Maccas, so I decided to get a cheap jacket. In Target, there was only one single jacket; leather, sizes L and above. Instead, I bought an umbrella, which turned itself inside out, so I had to think of another plan.

I went to Myer to have a look; and ended off finding a $70 cardigan in the "Youthwear" section (I kid you not!) that had been reduced to $35, and had a further 75% off. The thing ended off costing me about $8, and performed its job of shielding me from the cold. I also found a Kenji shirt there that was $50, but it was so nice I couldn’t resist it.

What else did I get? Oh, I bought a $15 Sunbeam massaging cushion. It vibrates. Lots of fun; I can imagine this thing getting misused by gift recipients :-)  I might do some "misusing" of it myself!