A Man and his Penguin

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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 7:18 am and is filed under Advocacy, Copland, Entertainment, Permanent Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.