Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

Got A Cheap MIPS Subnotebook

I bit the proverbial bullet and ordered that cheap MIPS-based subnotebook from Geeks.com. Ordering was a comedy of errors as something went wrong with the order while I was away on vacation and was cancelled upon my return, which is when I noticed that the subnotebook had decreased in price by another $20, a discount that has since ended. But the Alpha-400 arrived today, almost at the same time that I read the Engadget headline EMTEC’s sub-$400 10-inch Gdium netbook gets specced. The Gdium, you might recall, is another, slightly more capable, MIPS-based laptop slated for general availability somewhere between now and the end of time. The headline made me think that the laptop’s release is eminent. But a deeper investigation reveals no firm or even loose commitment regarding shipment.


Belco Alpha-400 in its box

But I have the cheaper MIPS-based laptop in my hands, one that goes by many names. In this region, it is called the Belco Alpha-400. Let’s see what it can do. Continue reading →

This Is What I Was Trying To Avoid

I checked my website bandwidth overview tonight. So far for the month of January, the bandwidth served from the main multimedia.cx domain is actually much higher than the bandwidth served by my gaming blog, which never happens (lots more pictures over there). I dug a little deeper into the details and found this:


Googlebot causing bandwidth havoc

So who is 66.249.67.1? Why, none other than crawl-66-249-67-1.googlebot.com. Why has it taken such an interest in my site? Oh, little pages like this:

66.249.67.1 – – [01/Jan/2009:00:58:01 -0500] “GET /fate/index.php?stderr=41851 HTTP/1.1” 200 69107 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

66.249.67.1 – – [01/Jan/2009:00:58:06 -0500] “GET /fate/index.php?build_record=43652 HTTP/1.1” 200 3297 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

You see, I thought I had administered my FATE web database responsibly by adding the appropriate robots exclusion file at http://fate.multimedia.cx/robots.txt by simply disallowing crawlers at this point. I completely neglected that http://multimedia.cx/fate/ is a perfectly valid route into the site.

Lesson learned.

About That 32-bit Chroot

Pursuant to my earlier frustration with building and running 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit Linux installation, I have returned to the chroot suggestions set forth in the comments section for that post. I found the DebootstrapChroot HOWTO on the Ubuntu Wiki which seems to be a fairly authoritative solution. Except that it didn’t work right for the many times I was trying to set it up some weeks ago.

I finally got the 32-bit chroot to work tonight. Thus, I am working to migrate the 8 x86_32 configurations over from the VMware machine. All of the gcc versions work when transplanted directly (2.95.3, though, is only happy living in the same path where it originally resided). I am rebuilding a new version of gcc-svn for x86_32 (no reason to migrate an old version when I am constantly updating from gcc SVN anyway). I could probably migrate the Intel C compiler wholesale, but it would probably be better to take this opportunity to finally upgrade from .15 to .17 in the 10.1 series, at least until Carl Eugen Hoyos gives the all-clear to upgrade to the later series (last I heard, it can’t handle the FFmpeg source).

For my future reference, as well as for the benefit of other confused Ubuntu users, I am documenting how I managed to set up the 32-bit chroot environment. I started with the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebootstrapChroot and found them to be mostly accurate but in the wrong order in some places. Mostly, it had to do with the mount points and when to activate them. The original Wiki describes chrooting as root, performing a bunch of apt-get package maintenance (section: “Setting up your chroot with debootstrap”), and only sometime later (section: “Getting stuff (…) working automagically”) setting up special mount points. Then later on (section: “Setting up a dchroot (non-root) environment”), the document recommends replacing the earlier mount points with a new set. Following those instructions in that order always left me with a confused and corrupted chroot setup. I solved the problem by setting up the second set of mount points before performing the initial package maintenance (and never using the first set).

Also, I found it very useful and bandwidth-saving to make a backup copy (‘cp -a /var/chroot/intrepid /var/chroot/fresh.intrepid’) after the cursory debootstrap command. Just in case, you know, it doesn’t work out quite right the first, second, … tenth time, you won’t have to wipe the chroot directory and download all the packages again from scratch.

FATE Comes Through

I was away on a brief Christmas vacation for the last week or so. I was completely absent from ffmpeg-devel list traffic during that time, as well as all email. Occasionally, I would sneak a look at FATE’s main page when I was in the vicinity of an unguarded web browser and clench my fists when I saw that various FFmpeg items were broken, powerless to alert anyone to these facts via email. My tensions eased, however, and my spirits lifted when I would check back a little while later and see that the problems were gone and that the SVN log messages indicated that code was being submitted specifically to address the breakages.

Go team.

However, being away from the action and having FATE as my only window into FFmpeg development reminded me of the various ways the web interface desperately needs to improve. The main fate.multimedia.cx page needs to have a brutally concise summary of the health of the FFmpeg codebase as tested by FATE. I envision that the spirit would be, “Everything is okay… except for the following problems: …”, followed by a list of problems, sorted by newest to oldest.

How to do this? For starters, I have had it on my TODO list for several months now to experiment with some popular PHP web frameworks. I have done enough homework to get over my distaste for the notion of such frameworks and I’m thinking (hoping, really) that one can be of substantial benefit.

Of course, another oft-requested feature is for email notifications when something breaks. Believe me, I really want this too. As you can imagine, this is something I really want to get correct from the start and verify that all the bugs are stamped out. Specifically, I’m paranoid about accidentally spamming a mailing list due to a stupid bug. Also, I want to make sure that such a notification service reports the useful information, where I’m currently defining “useful” as state transitions: report when a build or a test goes from working to broken or vice versa. But I also want to be able to aggregate information about breakages. Example: There are presently 20 FATE configurations. If an SVN commit breaks a test for all the configurations, it would be better for an alert email to report concisely that a recent commit broke a particular test for ALL supported FATE configurations, rather than 20 individual emails representing each configuration, or even one email listing each individual configuration.

It’s a real concern. If I don’t get this right, it’s only going to irritate people right out of the gate and defeat the whole purpose when it goes largely filtered and ignored. I know from whence I speak due to working with similar notification systems on other large codebases.