I Strongly Dislike Open-Source Developers And So Should You
Open source projects are awesome, right? They provide usually excellent programs, with source that allows any random developer to hack it apart and improve and bugfix. They allow people like Michael Niedermeyer to yell at people and be tyranical about media players and what code is allowed (fuck you I want matroska editions, uau plz2provide) and they allow people like the great folks at the Chakra Project to make what I like to refer to as KDE on crack.
Yesterday, I went about the usual task of adding another disk to my LVM grid. I had also upgraded from KDE 4.2 to 4.3, and because KDEmod is awesome, I assumed there would be no conflict with the absolute retardation that stock KDE in Arch had introduced with its crazy package splitting (fuck you Debian for encouraging people to split shit) My LVM went fine. I had 950GB of space floating there for the ComSSA LAN this weekend. Excellent. Reboot. FUCK.
Somebody had FORGOTTEN TO TELL ME AND THEN PROCEED TO MAKE NO NOTE OF IT ANYWHERE AT ALL that due to Arch’s dumb splitting, KDEmod had been forced to rename the ~/.kde4 dir to ~/.kdemod4. I rebooted into a system that appeared to lack ALL my settings in their entirety. A simple symlink fixed this but the time it took me to find out about it was crazy. This is by no means the biggest cockup Arch has done recently, I recommend reading http://archlinux.me/brain0/2009/08/16/shit-happens-when-you-party-naked-or-use-crappy-shell-scripts/ for a good read on how to fuck up a repo, admitedly I have done this to Ophion twice, but not quite as spectacularly.
I guess I can complain about Arch but it is still my favourite distro, at least until FreeBSD implements Pacman, and then I am getting the fuck away from Linux. Arch is quirky, and it has some really random bugs that no other distro seems to have, expecially involving wine and ffmpeg, and the 64bit version is a load of shit for the most part. Curse their insanely good package manager for keeping me in Linux-land.
Now to finish all that Gulden Draak in my fridge and worry about finding a good window border style and wallpaper, because I am finally changing my desktop for the first time in 3 years. I might even ditch KDE, who knows~
Today I Learnt That Pirated Software Runs Better Than The Legitimate Version I Almost Blew Ninety Dollars On
This post is about piracy. If you do not condone piracy, stop here. If you don’t care, are from the GNU legal team, or otherwise find this shit hilariously entertaining, then carry on.
So, this morning, I made a PERSONAL BACKUP of the first bluray volume of Xam’d of the Lost Memories. TO my horror, I came across gods damned DTS-MA audio, and adversary I had encountered on the Eureka seveN movie as well, but previously ignored.
Ofc, there is no open source decoder for DTS-MA, and, for some reason unbeknown to me, my Sonic decoder was broken in wine. So I turned to the next alternative: ArcSoft’s massive lump of shit that includes an HD audio decoder. I almost spent $90 before I realised I had a copy of it somewhere that came with my sister’s laptop. So LEGITIMATE SOFTWARE ON MY PC.
Needless to say, it didn’t work very well. Or at all. I messed around with it for a few hours before giving up and downloading a torrent, but it’s ok because I have a VALID LEGITIMATE SERIAL CODE. Suddenly, it worked. So basically the moral of this story is pirating shit works better than using the proper software, although for legal purposes I’d suggest “paying for it properly and then pirating it and using your legit serial,” lol ensuring I don’t get sued by the GPL people.
In the end I got annoyed with shit fucking up and ended up just installing Sonic on a client’s Server 2003 box and encoding the audio on there. Additionally, this entire exercise was useless because what leechers are going to care about 24bit FLAC anyway? It’s 1.33GB for two episodes. ONOES TALKING ABOUT FANSUBBING.
Ohi AAPT, Why Won’t You Let Me Give You Money?
The other day, I came across this GLORIOUS offer from AAPT, an ISP in Austfailia. This afternoon, I gave them a call to enquire as to how good a deal it really was. Connection stability and speed aside, I went straight to the important bits: QUOTA. Australia has this awesome idea that all ISP’s should offer a quota, as in, if you download more than a certain amount during a certain time of the day, say hello to symmetrical 64kbit speeds. Obviously this AAPT offer for TRULY UNLIMITED off-peak downloads was awesome.
I download a lot, and I mean, a LOT. So when I called AAPT, I was much less than pleased to find out that their peak quota maxes out at 60GB. Nonetheless, I persevered, only to be completely and utterly shocked that an ISP is unable to handle multiple connections to the same physical location over different lines. I have two phone lines (disconnected from actual phones, because I live with a bunch of antisocial misfits) and I also have a dual line modem. It allows me to plug two lines into the modem and effectively split traffic between them.
I guess you can see where I cam going with this: $200 a month for 120GB peak, unmetered offpeak, 48MBit, although at my distance from the DSLAM it would be more like 12MBit, still a vast improvement on my current speed, at a slightly cheaper price. However, it seems AAPT is unable to have two COMPLTELY SEPARATE LINES going to the same client. How is that even a problem AAPT, please, just tell me.
My current quota is roughly 750GB including WAIX. I use almost all of this. How long till an ISP in Australia can offer me a useable plan I wonder? I pay an absolute fortune so clearly funding isn’t an issue, but why is it that no matter how much I pay I cannot get a non-commercial line with reasonable speeds and tranfer? The only thing I need say further is the following:
Dear Each and Every ISP in Australia,
Fuck you all.
Love,
Emess
The Internet is a Series of Failures, at Least in Australia
After a post I made on a forum belonging to the guys that coordinate .wa.au’s largest anime convention, Siren actually replied, and have ammended their blogpost. While I still think this is something that needs to get out in the open, I do think Siren is definitely going down the right path and eventually we will have quality anime in Australia. I shall now proceed to make another post about the quality of Madman webcasting, and what Siren said in response to my comments:
I liked what you guys wrote about standards converting, and how to get Supreme Quality. It was really insightful into how the industry fails. I also liked how your post on this changed after someone decided to look up telecine on wikipedia, that was really cool.
Re: Article: After publishing the article I wrote, our authoring technician pointed out a mistake I had made regarding the the explanation of different options we have at our disposal when converting from NTSC to PAL. The change was minor and made the explanation more concise, and so I did not think to make a public mention of the change but I have now.
So, just a few things I was wondering about. Are you guys considering webcasting like Madman is doing (and perhaps doing it with a sane codec/bitrate/subtitle method?) Also, can we expect FILM framerates on any blu-ray releases you guys may or may not release, or will those be raped with PAL and thus destroy the Supreme Quality we all came to expect from Siren a few years ago? Please answer truthfully Siren, and if you don’t know what I am talking about, say so.
Re: webcasting: we are exploring the options, albeit at present more from a viability standpoint than a technical one. Currently we’re analyzing the required capital investment, ongoing overhead costs and various revenue models involved to recover those costs, then weight them all up. While I don’t have a launch date I’d say it’s simply a matter of time. You’re clearly well-versed on the subject, PM me and indeed, perhaps we can work together in some capacity.
I’ve left out everything they mentioned about blu-ray as it’s not really necessary. I do find it interesting that a publisher is interested in working with fansubbers, given that it’s an encoder we’re talking about while traditionally it’s been the translators that have joined the industry. It seems possible that Australia may have a decent webcast on it’s hands.
While speaking about webcasts, I think it’s time to bring up Madman Entertainment once again. When they first started their Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood cast, I was quite impressed. After episode two, not so much at all. Yesterday I went and capped Madman’s episode six. I won’t say much for their security as it’s non-existant, and the region blocking takes about 3 seconds to overcome, but the stream itself that I got was terrible. It was 576p VP6 video, although the framerate was correct which is a change for Madman, the bitrate was so low I couldn’t bare to watch it on my monitor fullscreen, or even windowed. The audio on the otherhand was very nice, 192kbps VFR mp3, which while it was nice in my ATH900’s, it also wasted about 15MB of bitrate that was desperately needed by the video.
One odd thing about the Madman stream was that it was 576p. While this is practically a standard on Australian DTV, I don’t understand why Madman used it at all. Especially when the player window was 640×480 with 640×360 actually going to the video, which is less than a fansubbers SD, yet it was about the same size as “400p” and looked so much worse. Colours were bad, blocking was abundant, and general bitrate starvation was VERY apparent. So if it’s displayed at 640×360, why bother encoding to 576p at all? Apparently that was for fullscreen, on which it looked even worse.
Australia has a long way to go with webcasting and Madman is really just showcasing what’s wrong. My comparison with Madman’s webcast and my own encode can be found here.
Goddamnit, Siren, Madman, AUSTRALIA IN GENERAL: FUCK
I have grown sick and tired of shoddy products in the Australian DVD market. I have been a long time advocate of supporting Madman for the most part (the anime club at my university frequently works with Madman) however I always suggested people stay the fuck away from their DVD’s. I am of course talking about PAL conversions. OH NOES PEOPLE STILL USE PAL BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE FANCY LCD’S OR PLASMA’S? YES, INORITE? I LOL’D TOO.
Recently, Siren have licensed two series over here, The Tower of Druaga, and Genius Party. When Jon first approached me about Siren being interested in doing their PAL conversion right, I was pretty happy, “Finally,” I thought, “someone is doing it right!” Turns out I was dead wrong. About a week ago, I got an email from Jon, with a link to this. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the page as it was last week, however since I replied to the email, it’s been changed drastically. I was informed last night that I have now royally pissed off Siren’s authoring house, to which I just lol’d. Here are some of the gold statements that the page had up, as quoted in my email.
We could use clever software and hardware to merge the frames, keeping the overall fps speed. This method, technically called field interpolation, is best used when the original source is a ‘true’ NTSC original and the picture motion is present in ALL the frames (relatively rare in anime). This can give very good results when handled carefully.
Well, I guess if the original source is 24fps and you like ghosting, it’s not too bad. I don’t see how this works at NTSC though, as you’d be DROPPING frames, not interpolating, what?
Another, more preferable way would be to re-create the 24 fps version and then play this, sped up, to PAL frame rates. Although speeding up might sound like a horrific thing to do to your film it is actually the best looking method, an industry standard procedure for motion pictures and can often end up being better than the original! It’s worth noting you have to handle the audio very carefully to correct the pitch (our authoring house uses high quality DIRAC processing).
Speeding up is better than ghosting fo’ sure, but it’d change the runtime. I guess if you fix the sound it’s not too bad an idea.
Finally we could use last method, called ‘Inverse Telecine’, but only in the event we are working with true true 24 fps originals.
Wait wait wait wait wait WHAT? So, telecine involves taking a video, and interlacing it with successive frames in a pattern to artifically simulate a higher framerate. So, for example, with 24->30 fps conversion (2:3 pulldown) one would be duplicating 1 frame in every 4 to make it 5. There is an excellent graphic on Wikipedia of it that I can’t be bothered linking here. So, if I understood Siren’s authoring house here, they are planning to INVERSE telecine, the process of matching the fields and decimating the duplicate frames, in a way to UP the framerate? Does that sound retarded to anyone else? I thought so.
Apparently, I am a noob that needs to read wikipedia more, which is awesome as my email QUOTED wikipedia for like 1/3 of it. So, for anyone in Australia that wants quality anime, or any international films really, I urge you, BOYCOTT SIREN AND MADMAN. Demand Blu-Ray 1080p24, demand no upscales, DEMAND PROGRESSIVE RELEASES AT THE FRAMERATE OF THE ORIGINAL ANIMATION. It’s NOT hard to do, and these companies are fucking you over with inferior products. Anyone with a TV capable of playing anime/film at this resolution will have an LCD or Plasma, which are all capable of multiple framerates, so there is nothing to stop releases at FILM rather than PAL or NTSC. With DVD’s, it’s a bit harder, but I see no reason to not release at 24FPS, unless people have ancient TV’s, in which case some sort of soft telecine could be set up or some shit.
So, how do other people think we should be getting PAL from FILM/NTSC? Keep in mind the material these companies get sourced from Japan is telecined NTSC, so it’s 30FPS after pulldown, and 24FPS natively. Speedup is one way, 2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:3 pulldown is another. One could interpolate as well I guess. There are a few ways, what do the 4 people that might actually read this think?
DISCLAIMER: almost all 24/30FPS mentions in this post are referring to these rates with 1% slowdown, that is, 23.976FPS and 29.970FPS. I also would have pasted my entire email but didn’t feel it necessary, given it was sent to Siren.
y u do dis firefox?
I have been a long time hater of Firefox since about 1.0 came out. I remember loving it back in the 0.8 days, before it turned into a bloatmare (bloated nightmare, I am a master of the English language obviously) So last week, when I had so many tabs open in Opera, Arora, and Konqueror and decided I would nuke them and reopen later to see what I had up and kill the irrelevant tabs. I was then faced with a choice: Midori, Galeon, or Firefox. Now all three are GTK so should be as bad as each other, but I figured Midori was just an Arora clone (or vice versa really) and Galeon is old, so I went with Firefox. Wrong Fucking Choice.
I am wondering if anyone else has had this issue with Firefox, I believe it only effects *nix users, as an OSX G5 user I know has said it happens to her. One certain pages, but not all, and it seems to be somewhat random except GMail ALWAYS does it, cause my HDD to start grinding. It makes a terrible noise like the arm and head are ramming into the platter like a 15 year old virgin and his birthday whore in this terrible cacophany of OH GOD MY HARD DISKS FFFFFFFFFFFFF. Has this happened to anyone else?
That’s about all I have to say on the matter besides for Firefox 3 still rapes memory but isn’t too bad without any extensions, and it’s still an ugly as fuck GTK application.
Creative? Well it used to be…
Last week, I plugged my Zen Vision M (30GB) into drf’s DeviceSync and nothing happened when I searched for it to send media. That was a bit odd but when mtp-connect failed from cli, I figured it was a broken libmtp, which didn’t really surprise me. What did was when I plugged it into Kano, my Windows box, and the Windows MTP driver didn’t read it. It doesn’t even charge when plugged into USB, however the main power line is fine. I am assuming that it’s internal Device Info or something is broken, and it is thus useless for updating with new music (or the new eps of Castle and The Listener which is what I wanted to add this morning to watch on the bus to uni.)
This is not good, as I have had this player since I was 17, a good 2 and a half years now, and I don’t think it’s under warranty anymore (I should really check amirite?) Now, I have no idea what to do, it’s not like I have any cash to grab the new Zen’s, and I really am happy with Creative products in general. I guess it still works for media playback, just not putting new shit on.
UPDATE: Oddly enough, it seems libmtp 0.3.7 can read it while 0.3.5, and Microsoft’s MTP cannot, hurr, but DeviceSync segfaults, gg drf >.<
UPDATE2: libmtp 0.3.7 detects the device but won’t connect, whuuuuuut
UPDATE3: With a bit of hax, I managed to get libmtp working (0.3.7) while 0.3.5 and Windows are still unable to. It seems the device wont send it’s ID and system info, however I got it to bypass that and am now uploading some music and my 2 eps to it. I do want a new player tho, looking at either the Zen 16GB or the Zen X-Fi 32GB (AU$227 vs AU$367) Has anyone used either of them?
I somehow like the keypad better on the Zen, but the X-Fi does look kinda cool. Not sure whats up with the lack of h264 support, or a 16:9 screen, but w/e. Not sure 16GB will be enough tho, I am using 21/30GB on my Vision M in music alone, but I dont know if I listen to more than that anyway, and the X-Fi has wireless, anyone?
All about makepkg and splitpkg .conf files
Today I was looking into ICC (Intel’s C/C++ Compiler) after someone in #x264 mentioned it. I was wondering if it was possible to not only customise a pkgbuild, but also the entire build environment as well. Obviously it’s possible if anyone takes the time to read makepkg.conf, however it got me thinking on some other things. Makepkg, for those who aren’t aware, is like a lot of the other Arch tools: simple shell script. The same goes for abs, and various other daemon and startup related things Arch does.
Customised compiler usage, or “I want to use ICC on everything”
To configure makepkg or splitpkg for ICC, simply open the required conf file, skim down to the ‘Architecture, Compile Flags’ block (for cleanliness rather than necessity,) and add in CC=icc and CXX=icpc. That’s it. As makepkg is a shellscript, it automatically loads the correct info into the build environment when running your pkgbuild. For an individual pkgbuild once off or whatever, add those variables to your build block pre-make.
Package differences and binary patching
I only noticed this feature earlier today, but makepkg actually has an xdelta module. One could add in the xdelta flag (read the source, too much :EFFORT: for me) and generate binary patches of previous patches, allowing relatively small changes to HUEG packages to not raep the connections of Indonesian, Brazillian, and Australian users. You could also stick Options=(xdelta) in your pkgbuild I guess. You’d need to have your previous package on hand however.
What the shit is splitpkg?
Chakra and KDEmod users, FLOCK! Splitpkg is the build system Chakra and KDEmod development uses. It’s an exact copy of makepkg and makepkg.conf, only the config is edited to allow for building regular packages as well as KDEmod packages. Splitpkg automatically outputs the built packages in the directory of choice, as well as a few other things.
I also run Quadpkg on my machine, another variation that compiles for -j5, outputs .tar.xz packages, and does some other handy optimisations for quadcores. My quadpkg is also configured for ICC now, which hopefully gives it more oomf.
There are other things one could try, for laziness, like distpkg, which is identical to makepkg, only setup to always use DistCC. Some things are better off not being done over distcc, but really it’s as simple as editan the pkgbuild for this, however, :EFFORT:
Now to figure out why nVidia is still broken, and then do some ICC builds of x264, ffmpeg, and mplayer. Ophion is sorely in need of repository updates on these as well as Aegisub, and quadcore optimisations could be interesting, although not too big a difference is for sure.
Remote Dependency Fetching
edogawaconan came to me today with a rather pitiful story. While Australian internet is notoriously fucked, it does maintain fairly OK speed, at an average of 1.5mbit or so. Indonesia lacks our silly bandwidth allocation but really lacks in the speed dept, to the point where downloading 35MB of makedeps or deps for a PKGBUILD takes forever. I think part of the problem is because Linux is generally faster than Windows, one tends to notice the internet being slower than the rest of the system.
So to combat this, I wrote a small bashscript that when pointed to a PKGBUILD file and given an output, it will get the URL’s for the deps and makedeps and cat them to a file. The script can easily be modified to SSH into your university and download for you, or just take the output file along with you to uni and run a wget -i output. Take the downloads deps/makedeps and either copy them to /var/cache/pacman/pkg and run something like makepkg -sri to install deps, compile and install the app, and remove makedeps.
I could of course add more functionality to the script but I don’t really care, and like always there is no help or support or whatever else I guess. Syntax and link below:
getdeps /path/to/PKGBUILD /path/to/output
I would recommend chmodding it +x and possibly sticking it in /usr/bin/ for ease of use, and of course this only works in Arch (including Chakra and Ophion,) and POSSIBLY Arch derivatives. The above example assumes it is in /usr/bin/, but if not and it’s in your current working dir for example, ./getdeps.sh in out and whatever.
EDIT: Updated with edogawaconan’s helper stuff, because I don’t care for helpful announces on failed syntax.
http://ophion.pastebin.com/f79a80758
nVidia 180.22: Fuck You, OpenGL
I only noticed this today when attempting to compile an aegisub patch for verm, but nVidia’s 180.22 driver has completely fucked up OpenGL, example as follows:
From aegisub’s config.log:
configure:22595: ./conftest
/home/matt/build/aegisub/src/aegisub-build/aegisub/configure: line 22597: 9899 Segmentation fault ./conftest$ac_exeext
configure:22599: $? = 139
configure: program exited with status 139
configure: failed program was:
|
| int main(void) {
| return 0;
| }
configure:22617: result: no
configure:22624: error: in `/home/matt/build/aegisub/src/aegisub-build/aegisub':
configure:22627: error: Please install a working OpenGL library.