I stubbornly refuse to give up my classic Asus Eee PC 701, one of the original netbooks. It’s 2.5 years old now but still serving me well. While these are supposed to be fairly disposable machines, I’m actually using this thing more and more these days (longer commute may have something to do with it). I decided to upgrade the battery from the included one (4400 mAh, rated for 2-2.5 hours). 7200 mAh batteries abounded for this Eee PC model but I decided to go crazy and buy the 10400 mAh battery.

And it’s huge. No one can keep a straight face when gazing upon this beast.

Naturally, I’m curious whether this battery is actually that much better. I searched to find if there are any established methodologies for testing battery life. It seems that the most established method is the most intuitive method, scientifically: Find a way to simulate typical usage and measure how long it takes before the machine dies from lack of battery charge.

Methodology Read the rest of this entry »

Remember CD-ROMs? They were totally gonna revolutionize computer technology, owing to the fusion of video, audio, text, and interactivity. Or some such. It sounded like a good idea at the time and the concept commanded an impressive premium. The reason I bring this up is because I recently scavenged several in a series of outlandishly expensive CD-ROM storybooks published for the Apple Macintosh computers circa 1990. By outlandishly expensive, I mean in the range of $70-$85 per disc (about $110-$130 in today’s dollars).

I’m not usually interested in collecting very old Mac software; the only reason I snatched these up was because of the ridiculous prices on the front of each. The thrift store had forgotten to mark its own price tags on these CD-ROMs and the cashier was tempted to charge me the full $70-$85 for each disc until I gently reminded him that it was unlikely that any single item in the entire store was priced that high. We settled on a dollar each.

One of these CD-ROMs came with a vintage Apple business card, someone who held the position of “Account Executive – Education”, at an address I don’t recognize (i.e., not at Infinite Loop in Cupertino). Makes me wonder if the office predates the main Cupertino campus. Digital archaeology is a young science.

Tablet computers seem set to run with the interactive torch; Apple’s tablet computer leads the way for now. I wonder if the latest innovations in interactive applications on such devices will seem quaintly ridiculous in 10-20 years?

For search engines’ benefit, these are the titles: Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t want my PlayStation 3 “upgraded” beyond firmware version 3.15 which is the latest that supports the Other OS feature. When this misfeature was announced, I disabled networking since I rarely play PS3 games and I never do so online.

However, I just signed up for a Netflix streaming account. This necessitates network access via the PS3. At the same time, I want to alleviate the possibility of accidental firmware updates by myself or anyone else in the household who might not be fully briefed on the technical issues and would often be prompted to update the firmware. I can think of a few ways towards this goal:

1. Set up my own DNS server that the PS3 has to use and blacklist firmware download sites.
2. Set up a proxy that the PS3 must route through and blacklist the sites through there.
3. Play games with my broadband router (a Linksys WCG-200) and block traffic to certain sites that would check for and download new firmware.

Another tip I found whilst Googling was to set the PS3′s DNS address to something nonsensical, effectively disabling DNS lookup. This was advised for keeping local media servers running without inadvertently updating firmware (I guess an older firmware update was going to take away some media server functionality).

All of these options require knowing which addresses to blacklist. Alternatively, I could figure out which Netflix addresses I need to whitelist.

I went with a combination of approaches 2 and 3. Routing traffic through Privoxy, I assessed that blocking playstation.net achieves the desired result. I added that to the website black list on the router and all is well.

I’m not sure who Kontron is but I can tell you that they have some bold advertising campaigns. I found this piece of junk mail in my archives:

In this ad campaign, someone dies.

Good aim.

One day, I saw Suxen drol create a new page on the MultimediaWiki discussing something called the Peak codec. I was about to scold him for not uploading and linking to samples for this codec until I read closer. The Peak codec seems to refer to a theoretical best possible codec. Could such a beast really exist?

Based on everything I’ve read, perhaps On2′s VP8 is the Peak codec of lore: All things to all people.

This past week, the internet picked up — and subsequently sprinted like a cheetah with — an unsourced and highly unsubstantiated rumor that Google will open source the VP8 video codec, recently procured through their On2 acquisition. I wager that the FSF is already working on their press release claiming full credit should this actually come to pass. I still retain my “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude. However, I thought this would be a good opportunity to consolidate all of the public knowledge regarding On2′s VP8 codec.

Pictured: All the proof you need that VP8 is superior to H.264
Update: The preceding comment is meant in sarcastic jest. Read on

The Official VP8 Facts:
Read the rest of this entry »

So I’m sitting in the tracing discussion at this year’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. One presenter discussed a tracing facility called utrace. This got me thinking of all the different _trace utilities I could name off the top of my head: dtrace, ptrace, strace, and utrace. Then I wondered how many letters of the English alphabet already serve as prefixes to the word ‘trace’ as software utilities. My cursory research indicates 21/26 24/26.

Oh yeah, I looked them all up (and thanks to all who helped me fill in the blanks):

• atrace: astrange’s raytracer
• btrace: Tracing for Java
• ctrace: multi-threaded trace/debug library
• dtrace: Sun’s comprehensive framework
• etrace: The Embedded ELF tracer
• ftrace: Fast traceroute for Win32; also ftrace: function tracer
• gtrace: Graphical front-end to traceroute
• htrace: apparently an extension to windbg
• itrace: not Apple-related (see ktrace); this stands for instruction strace
• jtrace: Java rewrite of a speech recognition technique called TRACE
• ktrace: Kernel tracing for certain BSDs including Mac OS X
• ltrace: Linux utility to monitor library calls
• mtrace: Memory debugger in the GNU C library
• ntrace: Tracing for .NET applications
• otrace: Oracle database tracing
• ptrace: Process tracing in Linux
• qtrace: Another traceroute utility
• rtrace: Ruby-Trace almost qualifies
• strace: Tracing system calls
• ttrace: Tracing facility for multithreaded processes
• utrace: Linux tracing
• vtrace: System-wide profiling of WinNT or Win2K
• wtrace: Provides information to debug methods (pertains to Tivoli?)
• xtrace: Tracing for X servers
• ytrace: Nothing
• ztrace: Win32 tracing utility

So, if you must make a new tracing utility, atrace, etrace, rtrace, ytrace, and ztrace all seem to be open.

Thanks for sitting through another of my pointless surveys. Oh, and thanks also to Google for providing Summit attendees with free, unlocked Nexus One phones. I haven’t seen many other mentions of this. Maybe Google does this so often that it barely counts as news anymore.

For 2 years, I’ve been wrangling with the overall architecture of the FATE system. Right now, there’s a primary fate-script.py program that manages building and testing on FATE installations that is sorely in need of many upgrades. Then there is fate-client.py which is a somewhat lighter-weight testing program. I have long wanted to merge the 2 scripts but could never settle on how to do it. At the base level, should the script assume that it’s operating in continuous build/test mode (a la fate-script.py) or single-shot test mode (a la fate-client.py) by default? Or neither? Should it force the user to specify a mess of command line options?

I had an epiphany recently while reading the documentation for Python’s standard (as of v2.3) optparse module, specifically the section entitled “What are options for?”

Options are used to provide extra information to tune or customize the execution of a program. In case it wasn’t clear, options are usually optional. A program should be able to run just fine with no options whatsoever… Lots of people want their programs to have ‘required options’. Think about it. If it’s required, then it’s not optional!

This led me to consider the possibility of a FATE script that could do something without any options and then build from there.

Default Operation Read the rest of this entry »

Some news is making the rounds that Google is funding ARM improvements for the Theora video decoder. It gives the free software faithful renewed hope. However, reading this news makes me wonder: Doesn’t FFmpeg already have ARM optimizations for Theora? In fact, it does, as indicated by the existence of the file libavcodec/arm/vp3dsp_neon.S. This has optimized IDCT transform/get/put and loop filter functions for NEON instruction sets. I know there are several different types of SIMD for ARM chips and I don’t know if NEON is the most common variety.

The most pressing reason for funding this effort is, of course, license purity.

A woman sat down across from me on the train, pulled out her knitting needles and went to work on what appeared to be a scarf. I briefly pondered the fact that she chose to busy herself with constructing a scarf the hard way when it’s obviously faster and cheaper to buy a scarf off the shelf.

Then I immediately pondered how many of my personal programming projects fall into this same category of wheels that don’t need to be reinvented. There are still plenty of projects I want to take on that would surely serve no practical purpose in the grand scheme of things, particularly when evaluated against what I could be spending my time on.

Video game console programming springs immediately to mind. I was interested in Sega Dreamcast programming long after the system had become obsolete. For that matter, I’m still interested in Sony PlayStation 3 programming, even though that community is about to be driven underground. I have long been interested in the technical aspects of the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and have always wanted to write software for that console as well. A few years ago, I even purchased RetroUSB’s PowerPak, a CompactFlash-based game cartridge, probably the easiest method for testing code on an actual system. Mercifully, I recently gave away that item (and the console, an SNES-style top loader), so that’s one less area on which I can waste my spare dev time. I still have the DC and the PS3, though.

My FFmpeg colleagues should be pleased to hear that I do try to make my FATE work a priority above these arguably more frivolous pursuits.