A Man and his Penguin

Tonight I was encoding two movies simultaneously, as you do, and my CPU managed to get to 47 degrees celcius.  So I tried turning up the chassis fan and opening a window to let cool air in, and then ran another 2-core load test using Kdenlive (well, actually, I encoded the last Doc Martin episode!). The graphics card, being passive cooled, ran cooler with the fan turned up and the window opened. The CPU took longer to get to the high-forties, but it did get there.

Judging by how yesterday was such a warm day, and I also ran into sweltering CPU temperatures, I decided to turn off my CPU’s overclock and put it back to the 3GHz stock speed. It gets pretty hot in this room during summer.

There are still people posting to the Ubuntu forums complaining that their videos look green/purple; all are using Nvidia graphics cards with the proprietary drivers. I don’t believe Nvidia has actually ever fixed this problem, they just seem to push the problem away from a particular card onto someone else’s card.

No wonder Linux users are starting to buy ATI cards. I’m still getting glitches and crashes that I believe are associated with the Nvidia proprietary driver. Also, I’ve noticed that my webcam doesn’t work since upgrading to Hardy. It didn’t work very well before, but now it’s just completely garbled output. I should try it without the Nvidia driver.

My problem with sound in World Of Padman is, apparantly, not easily explained by overclocking. Probably a PulseAudio problem.

I fixed that remaining problem with Blacklight3 and I’m going to package it up as a seperate package to Blacklight3Gui.

I’m sure there was something else to do with the overclock that I wanted to mention, but I can’t think of it now. At idle, at stock frequency, my CPU is running six degrees celcius cooler than it was when overclocked. I’ll have to measure it under load some time and see how things compare.

Tomorrow, I ring suppliers and ask if there are any repping jobs going. The reason I didn’t ring today is because my father and I went to Fremantle as a sort of day trip. We had a look in some shops, had an early lunch, then walked a roundabout-way to the Maritime Museum and looked for our family’s name on the Welcome Wall. We didn’t find it, which makes me think that my Grandad forgot to post the form into the Museum people.

Tomorrow after I’ve rung around for repping work I’ll go to K-Mart and pick up the 5th series of Quantum Leap on DVD; they’ve got it for $25. On my scale of entertainment cost/time, it represents very good value. I’m afraid that Surf The Channel might be closing down tomorrow; they’ve posted a worrying message on the front page about “all good things come to an end”. At least Quantum Leap will keep me occupied at night in between dinner and jazzing.

I’m also going to distribute some leaflets tomorrow about my AV installations. All I need is one person to hire me for $50 (my minimum fee) and I’ve made back the entire investment in dollar terms, as well as paid for the Quantum Leap DVD. Let’s hope I get a few people interested. Often, customers tell me that $50 is cheap for what I do, so I reckon I’m in with a chance. Anything to keep the money flowing in.

Remind me tomorrow to tell you about my father explaining the dumbness of e-book DRM. You certainly won’t hear an explanation like this one on DefectiveByDesign.com

And that’s just what I did.

Blacklight was a pretty dumb program. I discovered that ffmpeg could only use a single thread while encoding videos into the precise Walkman format, so half of my CPU was lying idle with the old Blacklight.

I also wanted to be able to truly batch-encode videos - that’s a pretty “command-line” thing to do. The third generation of Blacklight.

So today I wrote a multi-threaded command-line version of Blacklight (videos only, no plugins). It works beautifully. It starts as many encoding jobs as you have CPU cores, and once your CPU is full to the brim it stops adding jobs… at least until one of the jobs finishes.

There’s just one problem, but this isn’t a programming problem. Running my overclocked CPU at full steam seems to hinder my wireless reception! When running the new Blacklight3, my signal strength meter goes down to one bar; or as it is right now, I’ve completely lost reception.

The program also supports the traditional single-threading through the –force-single-threading option, so if you can’t afford to lose your network connection you can limit it to a single CPU core. The program also has a –queue-only option; it saves to a queue in your home directory rather than pesting you to get your Walkman out of your bag. When you’ve got your Walkman, you run the “blacklight3 –sync” command to transfer the queue to the device.

I could, and will, write a simple GUI for it much like the previous iterations of Blacklight. And I’ve just noticed one bug that needs fixing; the program seems to report that it’s finished, and it exits, while ffmpeg is still encoding and while the thread counter is still at 2! I guess I’ll sort it out tomorrow.

I’m taking my last week of paid vacation this week, because the shop is closing down next month and I don’t want to lose my vacation time. My future is still uncertain and I’ve suddenly just become tight with cash. I guess that’s just me being sensible; I’ve got some money saved up but until I’ve secured another job (hopefully a HIGHER PAID one) I don’t want to let that amount go down unless I can’t help it.

I’m going to print off a flyer advertising my services for TV and video installations, with a strong focus on teaching people how to use their stuff so people won’t be afraid of calling me out just to ask how to use their DVD recorder that their son already set up for them. I’ll drop them in the local area and hopefully that will yield a few $50 notes.

200 leaflets should be enough to get me started, and it should cost maybe $25 to print them. If I get one customer out of it, then he or she has paid for the entire advertising campaign. If I get two customers, then that’s magnificent.

Thanks to all my “install” customers from the last few years. I promise I won’t abandon you; I’m still available at the same mobile phone number. Sorry to those who I didn’t give my mobile number to; if you’ve managed to find this page and you need some help, please leave me a comment on this post and I’ll get in touch with you.

Also, thanks to all the shop’s customers over the last 6 years.

I’ve been quite sad recently, and I guess I’ll still be sad as we slowly dismantle the shop, but these things happen in life and I know I’ll be okay in the long run.

I’ll hopefully have the new multi-threaded Blacklight out soon with a GUI frontend for all the newbies :-)  I might move to Launchpad so as to get an actual repository for my program; if I do make the move I’ll post a message to the Sourceforge page. And yes, if anyone is asking, I had to reload the wireless driver to get it to reconnect after using Blacklight3

EDIT: Friendster doesn’t like quotation marks in the titles.

Macs are so great for designers, right? Well, on the Cnet forums there’s a guy looking for advanced kitchen design programs for his Mac, and so far nobody has been able to give him a response.

Cue “Use Boot Camp to install Windows and then run your kitchen software in Windows” reply.

If only Apple made a new software suite called iActuallyDoSeriousWork!

——-

One of the reasons I dislike Windows is the way it (as a platform) treats the user. It treats the user like an idiot who shouldn’t learn anything about their computer.

Perfect example. Windows Vista 32-bit, before Service Pack 1, would report the actual amount of RAM that was installed and addressable. For people with 4 gigabytes of RAM, it would report 3.2 gigabytes or less.

People complained to their RAM manufacturer, to their computer builder, and to Microsoft. So for Service Pack 1, Microsoft changed the behaviour so Vista reports the amount of RAM installed, not the amount of RAM that is actually addressable.

There are people to this day who believe that the 3.2 gigabyte limitation in Vista 32-bit was a bug, and that SP1 fixed the bug and is allowing them to use all 4 gigabytes. These people don’t just silently believe it, they argue against people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Only 3.2 gigabytes (or less) of their memory is actually addressable. This is through design; parts of your computer that have their own memory (like SATA and graphics cards) need that amount taken out of the 4 gigabyte addressable total, otherwise the CPU has no way of accessing this external memory.

Upgrading to a 64-bit chip and operating system is the only real way to solve it. Server operating systems do support a thing called PAE which allows 32-bit processors and 32-bit PAE-aware operating systems to have a larger address space, but hardware drivers need to be written to be PAE-aware too otherwise they won’t work. XP and Vista do not support PAE, and even if they did, you’re highly unlikely to have PAE-compatible hardware drivers.

But people don’t want to switch to 64-bit. “None of my programs will work!”  “None of my hardware will work!”.   They don’t know that. Most of their programs would probably work. If their computer, software and peripherals work with Vista, they likely have 64-bit drivers and 64-bit-clean* programs (or 64-bit native ones) available.

*32-bit programs on 64-bit Windows get installed into the “Program Files (x86)” directory. If the 32-bit program tries to access its own files through a hard-coded path, through just regular “Program Files”, then it won’t find them. There are also seperate registries for 32-bit and 64-bit programs, which also can confuse some 32-bit programs.

If I say that a program is “64-bit clean”, then I mean that it runs cleanly on 64-bit Windows, without trying to access directories, registry and libraries the wrong way.

Here is the text of my reply from the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. It looks like they’ve done some homework and asked the ABC for a Please Explain.

Dear Mr Lees,

Thank you for your email dated 8 August 2008 to the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy concerning the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Shops Downloads Service. The Minister has asked the Department to review your correspondence and reply on his behalf.

The Government provides an overall level of funding for the ABC but has no power to direct the ABC in relation to operational matters. Parliament has guaranteed this independence to ensure that what is broadcast is free of political interference.

The ABC has advised me that ABC Shop Online uses Digital Rights Management (DRM) to secure distribution rights to the materials it has made available. Producers and rights holders cite the known scale of unlawful distribution of content on the Internet when insisting on protection for their content before agreeing to release it online. Without these distribution agreements the ABC would not be able to make any content available to the Australian public via download.

With regard to those users who do not wish to have DRM on their computers, the ABC regrets it is unable to supply content via download that can be copied to multiple computers and devices as this would violate its agreements with the producers of the programs it is making available for download.

The ABC advises there are currently no World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) or Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) standards for secure online media distribution. Given this situation, the ABC decided to adopt the technology currently best suited to do this. Microsoft’s Silverlight technology (based on the W3C standard AJAX) allows for the cross-platform playback of video content (currently available for all major browsers on Apple Macintosh and other personal computers). With the release of Silverlight Version 2, there will be DRM playback on any system that has the player installed. The ABC further advises a version of Silverlight for Linux (called Moonlight) is being developed under Novell’s leadership in cooperation with the free software community and Microsoft, and this will ensure that the ABC Shop Downloads service will be available on all platforms.

Support for Mac operating systems has always been an integral part of ABC Shop Downloads and was a crucial factor in choosing the Silverlight technology. Version 2 is expected before the end of 2008. In the meantime, the ABC chose not to deprive Windows users who represent 80% of its total website audience of the service. When Mac users have access to the service in this way, more than 98% of computer users in Australia will be able to access the service.

The ABC Shop Downloads service is not a taxpayer funded service and has been set up to return funds to the ABC to invest in the creation of new Australian content. The ABC is continuing to look for news (sic) ways to deliver content to the Australian public which will support production of further Australian content in a sustainable way.

I note you have contacted the ABC directly about your concerns. If you have not already done so you should also provide the name of any particular program you have been unsuccessful in downloading and any error messages you have experienced so that the ABC’s technical staff can troubleshoot the problem, or find an alternative product as a replacement.

Thank you for bringing this matter to the Minister’s attention. I hope this information will be of use.

Yours sincerely,

Ann Campton

Acting Assistant Secretary
Broadcasting Industries Branch.

Okay. Thank you for your letter, and I appreciate the time you have taken to research things and get information from the ABC.

There are still things that remain unaddressed:

As I mentioned in my original letter, the software that the ABC uses to enforce its DRM is known to leech of the user’s internet connection to distribute the content to other people, without the user’s knowledge. Software that uses your computer for other people’s benefit without your consent is regarded as “Malware”. Viruses, trojans, spyware and keyloggers are all examples of malware.

The ABC requires that you install malware onto your computer in order to use their shop service. They might not be using taxpayer’s money to do so, but it is a surprising and disturbing thing for the ABC to be doing.

Moonlight is indeed an open-source project, and it does work of a fashion, but it is NOT compatible with the ABC Shop downloads. It lacks the DRM decryption software, and the makers of the DRM software will not license a decryptor for Moonlight. This is especially moot when you consider that Moonlight can’t even legally contain the video codec necessary for unencrypted playback, due to software patents.

And even the video codecs issue is moot at the moment. The ABC Shop Downloads site crashes Firefox 3 before you are able to even look at previews.

Therefore, Moonlight is not, and will never be, a solution for using the ABC Shop Downloads on Linux.

On the other hand, Flash Player is available RIGHT NOW for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and embedded platforms. It includes the codecs necessary for video playback. In addition, there are multiple Free Software implementations that are known to play web videos.

I would like to contact producers and copyright holders for these hosted TV shows and ask them whether they have heard of DRM before. I’d also like to ask them whether they know that TV shows can be recorded off the TV and distributed, sometimes in better quality than what the ABC Shop allows. The ABC HD stream is unencrypted and is available in 1080i HD with less compression than Internet clips.

In my original e-mail, I raised the point that people who download the clips must watch them in front of their computers, and that they cannot be burnt to DVD, moved to portable media players, or streamed to media centre PCs.  I also mentioned vendor lock-out, where the ABC’s customers could be denied access to the content they have rented if the ABC has a disagreement with the DRM producer.

Privacy is also an issue - the same software that is leeching off users’ internet connections is not open for study and may be compromising users’ privacy. The ABC claims to be committed to maintaining its viewers’ privacy.

The Silverlight platform is based on .Net C#, not on AJAX. C# is not a W3C standard (I don’t expect or want anybody to use W3C standards, but I didn’t make the claim).

None of what Ms Campton has said changes anything. Users are still being asked to install malware. Their privacy could be compromised. Macintosh users still don’t have Silverlight 2. Linux users still don’t have any Silverlight implementation capable of watching rented videos, and are not ever likely to even with Microsoft’s help. Linux is still growing at a huge rate. Windows users can watch videos downloaded through the service, but cannot transfer the content to portable media players or DVDs. They also cannot watch the downloaded videos if the DRM vendor goes out of business or decides to end the contract with the ABC.

The ABC has not replied to my letter. As they are directly responsible for their shop, they should have replied rather than leave it to the Minister’s office.

It runs Mac OS X, right?

These days, Mac OS X requires a Firewire port. I mean, it literally won’t boot up without one. Apple says it’s an essential system requirement for the operating system to run.

The iPhone has no Firewire port, nor even a Firewire controller. So how is it running Mac OS X?

Apple says that Mac OS X is Unix. But if so, it’s the world’s first Firewire-dependent Unix. Not even Microsoft Windows (another certified Unix, believe it or not) requires a Firewire port.

The App Store has Cromag Rally. It was a kinda fun game back in 1999, but why would people pay money for it these days? And if you think tilting the iPhone left and right to control the game is revolutionary, maybe you should look at one of the Kirby games for the Game Boy Colour?

5. SCO

4. Illegal monopoly

3. Mono

2. ISO fast-tracking OOXML approval process

1. Microsoft Proxy

The greatest Boycott Novell story would be something about “SCO is using its position as a Microsoft proxy to fast-track ISO’s OOXML approval process. This helps Microsoft to maintain its illegal monopoly in Mono-based software. Just look at these quotes from our own site, and a transcript from our own IRC channel, for proof!… The anonymous contributor from the IRC channel immediately gets a rating of +5 on our Credibility Index page.”

Come on Roy, write the perfect BoycottNovell story by including all the wankwords and the staple BN cliches!

UPDATE: I’ve just realised there’s another one: Patent Troll.

Restore Windows MBR in Ubuntu Linux

I had installed Xubuntu on a friend’s laptop, at her request. Then she got a job using MYOB… and I had to put Windows back on.

So I did that, and got paid for it. It’s sad that there’s one less Linux user, but then I think she didn’t quite understand what she was getting into originally, and her reason for going Windows again was a legitimate one.

I backed up her Linux data and then booted up her recovery discs. At the end of the recovery session though, the machine rebooted… back into a GRUB Error 17!

Usually, you just get your Windows CD out, run a recovery console and type “fixmbr”. But in this case I only had recovery discs made by Symantec Ghost, not an actual Windows install CD. I needed a way to restore the Windows master boot record from within Linux, and I found the answer after about an hour.

sudo apt-get install ms-sys

NOTE: This package is not included in Hardy! You must apt-get it and install it within a Gutsy live CD, or an earlier Ubuntu, or a different live CD. Or you could install from source (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ms-sys) if desperate.

The man page tells you how to use it, because you need to use a different option depending on which version of Windows you will be using.

Now, find out the device file of the hard disk by typing

sudo fdisk -l

Put it into the ms-sys command like so (the following command is ONLY for restoring the MBR on an XP system, not for any other Windows versions!):

sudo ms-sys –mbr /dev/sda

Note that I’m using the device file of the hard disk, not of any partitions on it. Ms-sys will not write the MBR to a partition unless you use the force option, because this destroys the partition table.

Important warnings:

READ THE MAN PAGE FIRST. (man ms-sys)

The –mbr option is ONLY for when you are installing or have installed Windows XP, NOT for 98 or 2000 or any other versions except where stated in the man page.

Make sure you use the correct device file! Turn off or remove all external devices except your live CD and the target hard disk, to avoid installing the MBR onto the wrong device.

Specify a hard disk, not a partition. If your device file name has a number at the end of it, then it is WRONG. Get rid of the number, and then it will be right.

For god’s sake, if ms-sys gives you an error message, DO NOT use the force option. Forcing the program to write an MBR to the wrong place will destroy your data.

UPDATE: I filed a bug report regarding the missing ms-sys in Hardy, and got a quick response. Apparantly it was removed from Debian because it contains what may or may not be Microsoft code. Now that I know why, I understand and don’t blame Debian or Ubuntu for removing the package.

The author of the software claims that his program contains part of the output of a Microsoft program (fixmbr). I have not studied the source code, but if this is true, there would probably be no problems involved in its redistribution. Microsoft cannot copyright the output of a program. However, Debian claims that it is actual Microsoft code.

Legally dubious, but highly useful, maybe ms-sys should be in Medibuntu.

I’m happy to report that earlier today, Apple released a new package of updates, containing one for the local root exploit I’ve been incredulously reporting for the last few months.

The security update looks acceptable; it disables scripting support for “system processes”. A little nitpicky thing here; I’d love to know if “system processes” are defined by Apple, or if they are defined by the presence of the setuid flag.

If the latter, then your system will remain safe. If the former, the exploit can be opened up again by any third party program that decides it needs to run as root without authentication. From the wording, I believe fortunately it is the better of the two options.

Another little nitpick: The discovery of the flaw is credited to one person, but it has been reported to Apple by many people.

Yet another little nitpick: Why did this take so long to fix? More importantly, why was it introduced in the first place by allowing cross-privilege scripts AND for one program to tell another to run a shell script? I still cannot understand why the “Run shell script” Applescript command exists, without using the phrase “kludgy hack around the security system”.

It’s good that Apple has finally closed this hole, as it now might be a while before we see more trojans (and finally worms) for the Macintosh platform. Mac users are safe for a little while. But the fact that this, and many other embarrassing design problems, existed in the Mac OS doesn’t fill me with any confidence.

Also, on the same security update, a fix for the “PPP passwords being stored unencrypted in a world-readable file”. On the surface, you’d think “That’s not so bad - a system that still requires PPP is probably a home system or in a small business with only a handful of users”.  I’d agree to an extent, but there are two more important factors:

1. People tend to use one password for everything. I do, even though I know I shouldn’t. An attacker who gains this password could have the keys to the whole computer. Let the keylogging commence!
2. Any programmer should treat passwords, no matter what they’re used for, with respect for privacy. It should just be automatic.

Ubuntu copped a lot of flak years ago about unwittingly storing the first user’s first password in a cleartext world-readable file. They were right to cop flak over that. But this OS X security update has come and gone with remarkably little fanfare. Yeah it’s great that they’re fixing flaws, but maybe if there was a bit more of a fuss about these schoolboy errors, Apple could educate their programmers a bit better or improve QA?

Youtube now has the much-feared Rickroll detector. Now it’s near impossible to rickroll anyone using Youtube

However, there are many more video sharing sites

Bloody Liberal party. Turnbull will last about 5 minutes in the job before being challenged by someone else. Honestly, whenever a party changes leader, it creates so much uncertainty among voters, which really does make it amazing that Colin Barnett “won”* the WA state election. Keep this up, and Rudd will easily get another 4 year term.

Molly went to the vet, and although they don’t know what actually happened, we think she probably ate something poisonous in there. She was throwing up all night. She’s much better now, but is still a bit weak.

The other day when putting in an order for more Sony stereos, I ordered a little speaker that plugs into the DM-PORT on my Walkman. Only now have I just realised that this is the modern version of the “Walkman Speakers” I used to use when the Discman was king :-)  Oh, and Hardy still doesn’t mount my Walkman automatically! I have to use pmount for fuck’s sake! This is Ubuntu, not Slackware!**

*The reason why I put quotation marks around the word “won” is because he didn’t win outright. I’m not using those quotation marks in the same way that university tutors do when talking about “President” George W Bush

**Slackware does actually automatically mount USB devices if you are running Gnome. Probably even my Walkman too.

Somehow, today our cat Molly got shut in the shed for most of the day. In the evening after we got home from a get-together, we started searching for her because we hadn’t seen her since this morning. Finally we found her in the shed. She’s been very quiet ever since, hasn’t eaten or drunk, and is just curled up on the family room mat.

I’m quite worried about her. After Dad has gone to bed I might dip my finger in some milk and see if I can get her to drink it. She was probably quite scared and I bet she thinks we did it on purpose.  I’m worried that she might have eaten something or drunk something that was spilled, while she was in the shed, and that this might be making her ill.

I guess we’ll see, but I hope it’s just that she’s tired from her ordeal.