A Man and his Penguin

We all miss him so much.

I just read these on Bash.org. Priceless!

<Eticam> I work at a computershop
<Eticam> And you don’t wanna know how f***in’ STUPID some customers are
<Eticam> I get questions like:
<Eticam> "What is better, a scanner or printer?"
<Eticam> "I’m looking for a serious mouse"
<Eticam> "My internet doesn’t work" "What kind of connection do you have?" "Windows XP"
<Eticam> "The mouse you sold me is incomplete" "Ma’am, it’s meant to have no cable"
<Eticam> I even had a customer who brought his pc for technical service
<Eticam> "My dog humped the pc and had an orgasm in the power
supply, and it short circuited" "how’s the dog?" "Don’t know, my wife
took him to the vet"
<Eticam> really, one day I’m gonna shoot myself in front of a customer….

And while you’re in the mood for a laugh, I used "O’Reilly Maker" to make a funny book cover in the style of those O’Reilly computer reference books: http://www.oreillymaker.com/link/14581/bashorg/

Tovid (or more precisely, dvdauthor) doesn’t want to know about the .vob of Keith Potger on Spicks and Specks, so I decided to transcode it to something. Preferably, something that is virtually lossless. And then Tovid could convert it back to DVD format.

I had the idea of converting it to DV format, but I couldn’t be bothered finding the correct options for ffmpeg on the command-line. I toyed with the idea of putting the footage into Kdenlive and converting it to DV that way, but then I wondered what Kino’s video transcoding capabilities were like.

I dragged the VOB onto Kino and it immediately offered to convert it to DV format. Precisely what I was looking for! I noted that the program seemed to be multithreaded in its conversion, but it wasn’t maxing out my processor. I guessed that the final DV file would be 5 gigabytes (in the end, it was 5.4 gigs - good guestimate)

At the same time, I wanted to Blacklight the movie "Lovewrecked" to put onto my Walkman, so I did that.

And I was met with a beautiful sight in the System Monitor: Both cores working at 100% of capacity.

Lm-sensors doesn’t read my CPU’s temperature correctly, it is always too low. But the temperature DOUBLED from 21 degrees C at idle, to 42 degrees  C at 100% load. I dreaded to think what the real CPU temperature was - 60 C? 70 C? My chassis fan is set to medium these days, and the actual CPU fan speed wasn’t going up much so the heat must have been dispersing correctly, but I still got worried and brought a pedestal fan out to blow straight into the empty floppy drive bay

Heh. But I *love* to see both cores earning their keep. It’s the first time I’ve ever thought "Gee, I wish I had bought the Q6600 instead"^!

^Note: Even with the Intel Core 2 Quad, the encoding processes might still have just used 2 cores. I was encoding with a total of 6 logistical GHz this time; if I had a Core 2 Quad using 2 cores, it would have been just 4.4 logistical GHz.

#2475: Remove a feature from EFI on its Macintoshes, then write a program that puts the feature back ("Boot Camp"). Bundle the program with the new version of your operating system, to get people to upgrade.

What’s next? Raising the chocolate ration?

I submitted a bug report to Tovid’s developers, about ffmpeg not using the -threads parameter when the computer has multiple CPUs/cores. I thought I probably wasn’t going to get a reply or anything, noting that their wiki didn’t seem to be modified after early 2007, so it was probably an unfortunately dead project.

This morning, my bug report was set to "Fixed", with the comment from one of the main developers that the feature was added in the svn version.

If you only need one menu in your project, I urge you to try the "Todiscgui" program. It’s ugly, and looks a little confusing. But you can make menus with lots of eye candy. Unfortunately, one of the VOBs I was using seemed to be corrupted or something, so during the authoring stage the dvdauthor program fell flat on its face. I’ll convert that VOB to DV or Xvid or something to try and get around the problem.

Here’s a picture of a simple, but attractive, menu that Todiscgui created for me.

…with VIA’s Pico-ITX motherboard.

I was one of the Mac Mini’s and Macbook Air’s harshest critics about their low capabilities. I’m still scathing about the Air - its portability is not the sort of portability that people find useful. The Mini is not good as an entry-point Apple computer, and it’s still locked down with a proprietary software stack. Despite what Apple fanbois say, it’s not a "cutting-edge form factor".

And it’s a giant compared to the computer I want to build, with a Pico-ITX board and a 4 gigabyte SSD. You could LITERALLY take it anywhere. The board itself is 10cm x 7.2cm. The power supply probably adds another 3-4cm on the long side.

It’s not a powerful PC. It’s not expandable. It’s not supercheap, but it would cost less than my current computer. It’s not easy to get the parts here. It doesn’t even have the best Linux compatibility. But it’s tiny, it’s quiet, it works for basic tasks, and I’ve just got to get one.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvdkuyp/flash/see.htm

Hilarious.

It was posted on the Ubuntu Forums.

I got a copy of Tovid the other day. I’d heard that it was pretty much the easiest DVD authoring package for Linux, and that on the default settings it creates fully compatible DVDs.

I decided to use the GUI as opposed to the CLI version (the CLI was recommended to me) and, barring an Xorg crash (which could have been, and probably was, due to something else), it all worked fine. I tried the resultant DVD in my Samsung combi, and it worked well except for one particular video which had stuttery sound at the beginning. Unusual. I also tried on my very-finiky LG recorder combi, and even that video worked brilliantly.

There was one problem: The menu didn’t seem to work when there were very long filenames in the videos. Take out those long filenames or replace them with shorter ones, and everything was fine.

You don’t get a lot of control over the menus, but the amount of control is sufficient to create home DVDs with background pictures, background audio, thumbnails, submenus etc. I’m happy with the result, and this ticks the final "Linux can do all I want of it" box!

It’s so common to see computers advertised with "Quad-core power!", and then see that in fact the computer has the budget Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor. Remember the megahertz wars, where processor clock speeds increased because consumers thought bigger numbers were always better?

Now we’re seeing the Core Wars. How much faster is a Q6600 than a Core 2 Duo E6850? If you’re a scientist, the Q6600 would be faster. If you’re an ordinary desktop user, even if you encode video, you’ll probably find that the E6850 is faster.

Most consumers don’t realise that their programs are single-threaded, and thus won’t take advantage of extra processing cores. Most consumers don’t know the difference between CPU and IO-bound activities - I often hear people saying "You could have a core dedicated to your virus scanner", forgetting both that virus scanning is an IO-bound activity primarily (is limited by your hard disk’s speed), and that the user cannot make decisions about what core is used for what activity.

The Q6600 has four cores, each at (I believe) 2.2GHz. The E6850 has two cores at 3GHz each. Sure, if you tally them up, the Q6600 has "6.6 GHz" and the E6850 has "6 GHz", but it doesn’t work that way. When I run a video editing program and tell it to use multiple threads for my multiple cores, I still find that the CPU only gets up to about 60-70%. One core is maxed out, the other core is moderately worked. If you had a quad-core machine, you’d find that two cores are maxed out, because the speed per core is lower.

Or, let’s look at MP3 encoding. I think this is a single-threaded activity. If you have an E6850, you have a 3 GHz core working to full capacity. If you have a Q6600, you have a 2.2GHz core working to full capacity. MP3 encoding does not paralellise to multiple cores. What is faster? The dual-core!

Yes, I’ve been talking about clock speeds as the comparison, but these processors are still the same microarchitecture, where you *can* compare clock speeds as indicators of performance.

I’d like to see advertisements say "Top-of-the-range Core 2 Duo!" or even "3GHz dual-core!", but then I guess it’s more difficult to sell computers based on what is actually better for the consumer, rather than what sounds more impressive. It’s not like it costs anyone anything to put in a good dual core rather than an entry-level quad core, as they are the same price. Until we see better SMP-ness in operating systems and applications, I’ll continue to recommend good dual cores over basic quad cores.

One of my workmates (the one whose computer I put Ubuntu on) is going to get an EEEpc for her son, after my encouragement. Before you start saying "Good stuff, you got her son into Linux!", the busybody at the distributor told her to wait for the Windows XP version, which will apparently be available from retail channels. Damn.

If there’s an extra charge on the XP EEE, she might change her mind. We’ll have to see.