In Code

I picked up In Code, the tale of Sarah Flannery, even though I have zero time to read it. I've found myself making the time... I've really enjoyed the book. It's an exceptionally vivid recollection of how Sarah visualizes mathematical puzzles, something that is seldom taught in the classroom.

Sarah talks about how she delved deeper into RSA and the Cayley-Purser algorithm. One tool she talks about her father recommending was Mathematica - surprisingly apropos reading right now considering all the media attention it is receiving around the release of Wolfram|Alpha. She mentions how easy it was to work with primes & factors within its notepad... and my interest in RSA combined with the latest buzz about Mathematica as some sort of crazy Rete engine made me get the 15-day trial version.

I thought Mathematica was pretty nice, and it included some very robust visualization tools. However its price was a bit steep, even for the home user. It didn't take me long to find comperable tools such as Sage, Octave and Scilab (thanks to osalt.com).

Sage is rather interesting, as its notepad can be run as a web application. That would (in theory) allow you to install Sage on a huge, beefy box (mebbe even a cluster) and grant several people access to a single, huge workhorse instead of investing in several large workstations. I dig that idea, although I was looking for a native desktop app instead.

Both Scilab and Octave were readily available through openSUSE's package repositories (including Packman), so I installed both (including QtOctave) to try them out. They were both fairly straight-forward command line apps, even though Scilab had its own terminal. I was looking for something with a nice IDE wrapped around it however... something that could approach Mathematica's UI. I installed QtOctave, which appears to act like a developer's IDE for the Octave runtime environment. It does an okay job and provides something of a notepad, although it is nowhere as intuitive as Mathematica's interface.

Functionally it appears QtOctave and Mathematica offer very similar functionality, at least for what I want to accomplish. I'll definitely be at a loss once my 15 day evaluation copy of Mathematica expires, but QtOctave should serve as a suitable replacement in the meantime.

Apricot Blending Crystal Space

I haven't followed Project Apricot in a while - I've been out of the Blender & Crystal Space 3D scene for a while now. It appears to have taken an interesting turn however.

It appears the final name is "Yo Frankie!" - finally available online or retail, including all the code & assets that went into the game. Both of them.

Errr... what?

Evidently the project forked - one fork was done entirely within Blender, the other built specifically for Crystal Space. There appear to be differing accounts as to why the for occured; the Blender Foundation claims that this was due to advances in Blender's own game engine, while at the same time they appear to say that there were too many technical difficulties to marry the Blender Game Engine and Crystal Space 3D. Ultimately Blender's game engine remains an entity on its own, and Crystal Space walks a separate path. It seems the Blender community wasn't happy with using an engine outside of their own doors and so they walked away from integrating with a more sophisticated game engine. Integration with other engines and projects... something that could make Blender thrive in a production environment... was abandoned to work on the more primitive Blender Game Engine.

The Crystal Core project seems to have re-adjusted its ultimate aims as well, similarly finding its initial objectives far too ambitious. That makes two flagship titles that haven't been able to reach their intended goals.

I'm wondering why Apricot and Crystal Core are both having such difficulties. My guess is that content generation can be done well, engine development can be done well, but the interoperability between the two is an equal if not greater effort. Compare the tools Eskil created for Love to the Blender + Crystal Space tools: building models and meshes in Blender can be fairly arduous and requires a lot of reference material while Loq Ariou can create meshes using freehand and UV texture mapping in Blender is a multi-step process while Eskil has created something that can do the UV mapping in a few short steps. Verse seems to be the glue that the Blender <-> Crystal Space interoperability was missing, creating a uniform way to remotely process assets and scenes.

The effort to have a Crystal Space 3D game engine within Blender would have been tough, but I believe it would have been worth it. It is definitely no easy task, but these kinds of tools are sorely needed. It is too bad Blender decided to push Crystal Space aside - I was looking forward to big things with their collaboration.

What I've Seen with Your Eyes

Eskil posted the video for his GDC presentations and they're abso-freakin-lutely amazing.

The gameplay of Love was interesting, but the video displaying the tools Eskil created are completely mind blowing. It's the stuff that actually gives you hope for the world again. The GDC tool video shows off several tools Eskil has released: Loq Ariou which allows you to create assets & models with the same ease as a pencil & scratch paper, Co On which provides scene mapping that's startlingly similar to how you might visualize things in your own mind, and Verse, a data transfer & protocol standard that allows such data to be shared instantaneously between applications.

Obviously Eskil had to create an intelligent set of tools to properly build Love within a decade, but I had no idea he had constructed such a cadre of tools that could be re-used by other developers. Not only does he speed content generation up and provide better interfaces - he goes one step further by breaking down human factor boundaries that plague every other asset generation tool to date. Just watch the video - especially the portion demonstrating shaders in Co On - and you'll see why I'm going completely nuts over these releases.

Eskil is giving back a huge amount to the community at large with these tools, and is likely opening the doors for many, many others to creatively express themselves in ways that were once prohibitively difficult. Love isn't just creating a fanbase... it's creating a legacy.

Candyland Gets Paved

I've been a big fan of Java for quite a long time, using it for nearly all my enterprise software development. Looks like I'm going to have to find something else now.

Today Oracle announced it would purchase Sun
Microsystems, the company that had previously played host to a myriad of great technologies such as the Solaris OS, the Java programming language, the NetBeans integrated development environment, the MySQL database, VirtualBox for desktop virtualization, the GlassFish application server (not to mention an emerging JMS server) and OpenOffice.org for open-source enterprise office software. With Oracle's purchase pretty much a done deal, you can now expect most, if not all, of these technologies to wither on the vine.

I rely on NetBeans, Java, Solaris, OpenOffice and VirtualBox so that I can do my job on a daily basis. With those removed, I'm pretty much screwed.

Think I'm being alarmist? Maybe. I did play Chicken Little when Novell bought SuSE in 2003, and that deal appears to be working out somewhat better than anyone expected - even amidst poorly considered kinships with Microsoft. SuSE is slowly recovering, and Novell seems to attempt to be a good steward. But Oracle? Lessee... what's their track record for aquired technologies? They've turned Tangosol Coherence from a must-have element in a distributed software stack into a minuscule trinket tucked away in their closet. InnoDB has not progressed well and has caused continue enterprise issues. And WebLogic? It used to be the fastest Web service platform out there, now it remains largely ignored.

Tell me... what strategic value is Oracle going to find in VirtualBox? Or OpenOffice.org? Do you really think Oracle would have allowed projects such as Hibernate to exist when they want to make Toplink ubiquitous? Oracle will continue to neglect these projects, just like they've ignored previous projects they've acquired, until they decompose.

Seriously, are you going to trust a company who's had the same impossible-to-navigate site for fifteen years? A company who attempts to license its products using terms that require a slide rule and burnt offerings to figure out? Just look at the difference of how each company announced the acquisition: Sun created a micro-site that explains the deal and attempts to sell a bright side. Oracle could hardly be bothered to post a statement, showing their indifference to the acquisition that will most likely just mean a reduction in competition, not an enhancement to their portfolio.

Right now it seems there are two possible outs: hope that Apache Harmony can deliver on its goal of releasing its own open Java platform, or abandon Java as a platform and move to something like Qt.

Maybe I'm prematurely freaking out. Maybe I'm wrong about Oracle's apathy destroying the projects acquired from Sun. I certainly hope so. Still, I would wager that the capitalist will continue to decimate good ideas, digesting Sun's properties into a discarded pile alongside acquisitions of olde.

You're Nice People. I'll Give You Monies.

I have a bit of a... troublesome patch with my iPods. My first one suffered the cruel fate of a lawn mowing incident. The next one suffered a more aqueous fate. Now the latest one has been acting odd as of late and several hours, system restores, re-formatts and a pass of badblocks later I found it had a hard drive riddled with bad blocks. I'm guessing the read heads were using the platters as a scratching post.

I needed hardware support here. Mind you I've never once meandered into the local Apple store, nevermind the Genius Bar. Yet I made an appointment, shuffled my way through and talked to the resident genius.

I was prepped and ready for a requests for long-lost receipts, RMA codes and waiting months for a refurbishment. So I met my genius, she listened to the symptoms, typed a while on her laptop and... handed me a new iPod.

Seriously, just like that.

The serial number was dutifully registered by iTunes and was shown to still be under warranty. So I signed for receipt of a new device and walked out the door. Ten minutes, tops.

What the eff? Why isn't life always this easy?

I'm sync'ing now and probably have a few hours to go. Small price to pay for instant gratification. I've given Apple lots of business; it's refreshing to see that they treat their customers with the same kind of loyalty.

Love for the Indie Developers

It was interesting reading GameSetWatch's interview with Love's Eskil Steenberg. Was very cool to hear Eskil was good friends with the garage developers at Introversion. Interesting also to hear his opinions on procedurally generated content.

Eskil is developing Love entirely on his own, and using procedurally generated content to generate what he needs for something of such a vast scope was a necessity. Introversion is familiar with this same issue - you can see its effects in Darwinia.

Would be a nice thing to get back into.

I Heart NVIDIA

Awww... NVIDIA. I love you and your driver updates, especially now that they're coming once a month to *nix.

Old is the new New

The open beta of Quake Live opened this Tuesday, and I made sure to jump on and register an account as soon as I could. Of course, like most other people online at Tuesday night, I was in queue with tens of thousands of other players. I finally had an opportunity to play last night for about 30 minutes, just to make sure my account worked and see how things were put together.

It is definitely the classic Quake III Arena in all its OpenGL goodness. When the title first launched over nine years ago its hardware requirements may have stopped it from becoming ubiquitous; it supported hardware rendering only and, unlike other titles shipping at the time, didn't have a software renderer. Ah, how times have changed. A quick look at Steam's hardware survey shows how the desktop tide has changed, and now tons of people have way more than enough horsepower. And it doesn't stop at the desktop - Q3 has hit every major console and is even being developed for the Nintendo DS. It has even been ported to the iPhone. Official Linux and Mac support of Quake Live is reportedly a priority after the beta, granting an increasing OS X demographic access. Ubiquity no longer is a problem; making the installation as easy as a multi-platform browser plugin lowers the barrier of entry to near nil.

The key factor that stops Quake Live from just being a Q3A port is the actual infrastructure it resides within. The game proper is the endpoint, but the content itself is driven from the ladders, achievements, matchmaking and map inventory system contained within the Quake Live web application. It is one of those blindingly obvious why-isn't-everone-doing-this moments when you see how the game is orchestrated with the Quake Live portal; the strengths of the browser as a platform is completely leveraged, while the strengths of your desktop are used to power the game itself. The creators didn't try to cram Quake III into the browser itself, thereby condoning it to some sort of Flash-based hell. Instead they let you use the browser just as you would normally use it: for networking, finding a game, chatting, browsing leaderboards, looking at achievements, bugging friends, strutting your profile and other... forgive me for saying this... "social networking" features. When it comes time to do the deathmatch an external application is launched in tandem, allowing a fully fledged and fast OpenGL app to run on its own.

An interesting effect of this split-brainness between an online presence and a desktop renderer is that it accomplishes exactly what Valve wants to do via the Steam Cloud, where preferences and saves are stored on a central network instead of client-side. Most desktop gamers don't like the idea of savegames or prefs being stored on a remote server pool, and I would agree. For single-player experiences I would much rather hack my own .ini files and not be stranded when someone's cloud goes down in flames (clouds do NOT equal uptime... see Google and Amazon themselves for examples). However for multiplayer games this is acceptable; if a server is dead or a line is cut you wouldn't be able to multiplayer anyway - so it doesn't matter where configs reside. As an added bonus when the configs reside remotely you can't have players hack them, resulting in reducing the map to a wireframe or performing some esoteric modification to give them a competitive edge. Again, hacks are fine in single player, but not in a multiplayer scenario.

Add into the mix the fact that the economy has positively tanked and people have completely eviscerated discretionary spending, meaning $60 titles are no longer in the budget. Quake Live brings a new title, albeit of an old game, to market for the price of absolutely free. While it is true that CPMs and CPCs for online advertising has completely dropped through the floor, hopefully Quake Live will be able to cash in on its unique presentation, dedicated fan base and sheer volume of eyeballs. If the advertising model works, and Quake Live continues to be free this will provide a huge edge over other FPS titles this year.

Quake Live is a game-changing title, even if they didn't change the game. But why bother? Quake III Arena was arguably one of the most well-rounded and polished multiplayer first-person shooters out there with textbook weapon balancing and gameplay mechanics that became a staple in the genre. Why change something that works? The only balance issue that the original Quake III Arena had was that, towards the end, veteran players became so good that it was no longer possible for a new player to have any fun on a map. Now with Quake Live's matchmaking mechanics and dynamic skill levels even that mismatch has been mitigated.

Yeah, I've already gone on too long about this. This approach just makes so much sense from an engineering perspective and a gaming perspective that I'm sure tons of titles are now going to flood into the market, ready to follow suit.

Who Can You Count On During Crunch Time? Turns Out... Nobody.

I've long depended on the software community to save my butt in times of need. And it used to.

It stopped helping this week, and instead started wrecking havoc.

You'll notice I did not say the open source community. And I did not say the Java community. Even tho these two communities are the ones that my latest rant is aimed at. No... this issue has already burned me big time with commercial companies, which is why I left the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. But now I'm not sitting any better... everyone has sunk to the same level of mediocrity.

Bugs now are being reported, exhaustively, patched and submitted to release managers. And yet months, even years go by without so much as a cursory review. A few good examples come to mind... there were fairly blatant bugs, even typos in a Hibernate dialect for the H2 RDBMS. The author of H2 reported the bug, patched it and even made unit tests for the project. Has the fix even seen daylight? No. It has been open since July of 2008.

Here's an even worse example: thousands (if not millions) of people rely on Apache's Commons Codec library. It's used for string matching, BASE64 encoding and a slew of other things. One of the speech codecs suffers from an ArrayIndexOutOfBounds exception during encoding. A simple mistake to remedy, and one that was remedied and committed to their source repository. Was such an obvious bug ever fixed in a production release? No. In fact, a new release hasn't been made in five years.

And some of the bugs are bad because the maintainers refuse to fix them and label them as a feature. For example, does Spring's Hibernate DAO framework actually begin a transaction when you call... say... beginTransaction()? Nope, beginTransaction is a do-nothing operation. Wow, that makes things easy to troubleshoot and fix.

Okay, so far I've described problems that all have ready work-arounds. That's the only saving grace in these instances - the projects are open-source and so fixes can be applied and binaries re-built. But do you really want patched, out-of-band libraries going into your production system? And what about when you hit the really big problems nary days before the "big release," like finding a fatal, obvious and unfixed bug in your JMS broker? It's been crunch time for two weeks, you're already sleep deprived, your code is absolutely going out in two days... are you going to make a gentle post on the dev list after unit testing a thoroughly researched patch for an obvious bug the maintainers missed? No. You're going to punch the laptop.

Basically I've succumbed to the entropy and decay of all the frameworks I used to depend on. Hibernate Core has over 1500 bugs that have yet to be assigned a release or triaged and doesn't even appear to be actively maintained anymore. Commons Codec hasn't seen a release since July of 2004... kids born during their last release are headed towards elementary school. And the instability of ActiveMQ 5.1 continues to plague its 5.2 release.

The standard reaction to this kind of rant is "if you don't like it, why don't you submit patches?" "Why don't you join the project and help out?" "Stop complaining and contribute!" Yet contributions have been made, entire bugs have been fixed by others MONTHS ago, and yet there addition to the project has netted nothing. What hope is there for a sleep-deprived guy like myself to contribute before his project goes down in flames and the powers that be bail on these frameworks for the rest of their collective careers?

Retelling Yet Another Myth

Last month I put together my second MythTV box. I've become tired of my VIA Chrome box... video acceleration was a joke. So I thought that an onboard GeForce 7050PV would work since it had XvMC support. Plus NVIDIA's (binary-only) drivers were usually pretty good. Right?



I ordered Shuttle's SN68PTG5 AM2 case, figuring I could re-use an old AMD64 CPU I had and stuff the hard drive in from the previous MythTV box. When I got the case in it was a bit larger... and louder... than I expected. I needed to push my TV forward to get the box to fit behind it. The sheer amount of real estate I was able to work with made the opportunity worthwhile however - there was plenty of space around the motherboard, even with the ginormous heatsink installed.

Maneuvering around the box wasn't bad - I was able to put in the old drive and fill both memory channels with two Corsair XMS2 512M PC2 6400 sticks without a single flesh wound. Putting in the CPU was another issue however - I was short a pin.



Yeah... my old, to-be-recycled CPU was for Socket 939. This was a AM2 socket board - meaning it took 940-pin CPUs. Gah.

I paused for a few days and ordered a 2.1GHz AMD Athlon X2. It was a 65nm Brisbane core and only consumed 45W, so the lower thermals would serve a Myth box fairly well. Plus AMD chips are cheaper than avocados right now... it was an easy sell.



I wrangled the case together, put on some new thermal paste, and re-attached Shuttle's massive (did I mention its massive?) heat pipe for the CPU. Installed my old pcHDTV tuner card to receive HDTV channels from my local cable provider, then sealed everything up. I attached the barebones StreamZap Ir receiver via USB then did a openSUSE install with the MythTV repositories.

lircd actually worked without a hitch... the StreamZap didn't have any issues. Neither did the pcHDTV card - it worked out of the box as well. Things were going well, so I shoved the machine behind the TV, connected it via HDMI and went along my way.



At first things appeared to work well. Thanks to NVIDIA's nvidia-settings application I was able to effortlessly setup my 1080p LCD to work over HDMI. X configuration was TONS easier than with VIA's chipset - there it took me nearly 20-30 hours to get the monitor configuration correct for SVGA out. Of course it doesn't hurt that HDMI is just a DVI formfactor... but I digress.

No, the big pain was XvMC. With acceleration enabled, video would playback (either live or recorded) for anywhere between ten seconds to five minutes, then send X into a complete CPU spin. I'd suddenly have 100% usage on a single core and a complete lockup of X11. X had to be SIGKILL'd - repeatedly - before things would stop spinning out of control.

Luckily I bought a dual-core CPU so I could easily regain control. No matter now hard I tried, however, video acceleration just wouldn't do anything but hard lock MythTV.

Finally I gave up and just told MythTV to use the CPU for decoding. This worked acceptably, even with 720p streams. The CPU was beefy enough - it's a dual core, dual channel rig that has the bandwidth. Just a shame that neither NVIDIA nor VIA were able to provide a chipset that would allow accelerated MPEG2 playback in Linux. C'mon - is it really that bad?

Now things are recording and playing back just fine. The vsync is disabled right now - so I do have image tearing during high-motion decoding. But hopefully NVIDIA's next round of Linux drivers will fix XvMC, give me accelerated video and take all my worries away.

Re-Catching the Gaming Bug

I've re-caught the PC gaming bug. By and large I gave up gaming over a year and a half ago once I retired in Cheydinhal.

Wow... has it really been that long? Eighteen months since I've done any gaming? I've been reduced to occasional dorking around on my n810 (that lil' tablet has worked fantastically, btw), but mostly I've been either designing, developing or otherwise working every waking moment of my day. Man, that's sad.

I received Assassin's Creed as a very loving gift yesterday, so I fired up the good ole Wintendo and attempted an install. It had been so long since I'd turned my home desktop workstation on that I had nearly six months of Windows XP updates backlogged. One hour of driver/NVIDIA/anti-virus/Windows updates, another hour of volume defragmenting, three hours of nTune tweaking, two hours of BIOS tweaks, one hour installing the title and over ten reboots later I had a working install of Assassin's Creed. Whew.

I have an old Athlon 64 X2 and some cheap (but stable) Corsair RAM paired with a doable GeForce 7800 GT. Of course it wasn't quite enough to muscle through Assassin's Creed with all the frames I wanted, so I brought up the tRAS, tRCD and tRP from 8-3-3 to 6-3-3, cranked the frontside bus from 201 to 234 MHz, brought the PCI-E reference clock up to 117 MHz (to bring the bus from 2500 to 2925 MHz) and slightly poked the GPU clock up from 470 MHz to 475 (memory clock wouldn't budge). Surprisingly this actually got me over the fence.

It's kinda fun coming back to the tweak-and-tune days of PC gaming. NVIDIA's nTune app makes tweaking system values a huge deal easier, since it will talk directly to the mobo's NVIDIA chipset via (I'm guessing) ACPI. I can let nTune do its thing, rebooting once its locked up, and just hack merrily away on the laptop in the meantime.

Tomorrow it will be back to work again, but for this weekend I'm having fun. It's overdue.

Why Wrestle with X When You Can SaX2 It?

I don't give SuSE a free ride - I've been frustrated up to the quitting point with them for some releases, but then happily optimistic with others. Now that KDE 4 and NVIDIA work together well now (KDE had some compositing issues with NVIDIA binary drivers & newer hardware) I'm finding that especially the cutting-edge factory builds of KDE 4.1.3 are working fantastically well.

Now that KDE 4.2 is just around the bend, the openSUSE team have been doing a fantastic job of backporting 4.2 functionality into openSUSE 11.0's KDE distribution. I didn't realize how many things SuSE was backporting and offering to its userbase early until I spoke with some Kubuntu users. They were asking me how I got SuperKaramba for KDE 4 working... how I was able to extend folder view to my entire desktop... how I was able to get my desktop to rotate on a cube... where all these screensavers come from... why didn't my desktop have redraw artifacts... why I wasn't seeing texture tearing during compositing... how I got the new power management utils...

I didn't have much of a reason why my laptop worked and theirs didn't. They talked about xorg.conf tweaks, and I just shrugged and said I had SaX2 and nvidia-settings take care of all the details for me, including input devices. When they asked how I got all these 4.2 features - with a stable installation no less - I just shrugged again. Seems like the KDE devs at SuSE were doing such a fantastic job keeping me current & backporting new features that I didn't even notice.

We talked a bit about YaST2, how it had changed for the better with recent versions, about how SaX2 means never having to crack open xorg.conf again, how so much stuff comes "for free (as in effort)" with openSUSE. Some of the stuff, such as the extra xscreensavers or the Really Slick Screen Savers, were things I kinda had to piece together on my own but by and large things just worked out of the box.

My shrugs ended up being a better selling point than any technical arguments I could have made. One started downloading openSUSE 11.1 RC1 into a virtual machine right away, the other was going to download the live CD when he got home. It will be interesting to see what their impressions are and if it "just works" for them as well.

And So It Begins - Vector Processing Standards Battle!

I'm not sure why I'm such a fan of this topic... maybe just because I enjoy watching the inevitable march towards entirely new CPU architectures.

Nvidia just released something that's been on Apple's wishlist for a while: OpenCL 1.0. Finally a "standard", royalty-free specification for developing applications to leverage vector processing units currently available on GPUs. While the processors on such high-end video cards aren't geared towards general computing per se, they absolutely blaze through certain workloads - especially those that work through sequential processing pipelines.

Microsoft's competing specification for some reason is available for DirectX 11 only, which makes absolutely no blimmin' sense to me. This basically means that your specification is limited to Vista... which rather defeats the concept behind a "standard." Not only do you get vendor lock-in, you get implementation lock-in. Sweet.

Can you imagine what this might do for Nvidia tho? Picture it now: tons of cheap commodity motherboards laid end-to-end, each with six PCI-E slots filled to the brim with Nvidia cards and running OpenCL apps on a stripped-down Linux distro. Supercomputing clusters for cheap.

Although I imagine the electricity bill might suffer.

Someone to Give Me the Time

It's been really interesting to see the responses from Blitz, Fly Object Space and GigaSpaces concerning state management as well as Newton and Rio concerning service discovery. I'm definitely learning as I go, but the good thing is that it seems like there are many in the community eager to help.

Now I'm working on another issue with enterprise service development - scheduled services. There are some services out there who may want a have an event fire in 1000 milliseconds, or five minutes, or an hour, or somewhere in between. This would appear to be an easy thing to solve at first blush - until you consider volume, quality of service and scalability. It's a steep drop into complexity at that point.

Here's the thing: you could easily just do a scheduled executor in J2SE, but once your VM dies then your pending events die too. You could submit a scheduled job to something like clustered Quartz instances, but then you must have a reliable back-end database to write to (no native replication). You could use something like Moab Cluster Suite, but it seems to live outside the muuuuuuuuch more simple realm of event scheduling.

So let's think outside the box and use some replicated object store that isn't necessarily meant for scheduling. How about we slap a time to live (TTL) on a JMS message, throw it on a queue and wait for it to hit the dead letter queue? That might work at times, but TTLs are really intended for quality of service and not for scheduled events. Unless you have a consumer attached to the former queue constantly polling for messages you're not guaranteed to land in the latter dead letter queue.

How about using Camel's Delayer Enterprise Integration Pattern? Nope - that's just a Thread.sleep on the local VM. Doesn't do you much good once the VM dies. How about a delayed message using JBoss Messaging? I've heard tell that it exists, but I can't find much reference to it in the documentation.

This isn't a new problem - there's even JSR 236 that is intended to address this problem. But it's been hanging around since 2004 with very little activity of note, so I doubt it's going to have much hope of working by Monday.

Until JSR 236 is addressed I'll likely have to just find a way to deal with this on my own. Maybe create a JobStore for Quartz that's backed by a JMS topic? Or just suck it up and build a clustered Quartz instance with a fault-tolerant database?

Gah. Sticky wicket.

Chipped Chrome

VIA recently announced that they have opened their reference documentation for their GPUs and are even now actively working with the openChrome project. For me, however, it's too little too late.

I've finally grown tired of even trying to get accelerated video working on my VIA-based MythTV box. XvMC support is simply non-existent and accelerated anything just doesn't work. With standard 480i broadcast TV I had no problem being CPU-bound for MPEG2 decoding, but it just doesn't fly with 720p and a pcHDTV card. I throw in the towel.

I'm looking at what Shuttle has to offer instead with either an Intel, NVIDIA or AMD platform. It appears that the graphic chipset choices break down into either GeForce 8, Intel GMA X4500HD, Intel GMA 3100 or GeForce 7050PV. The best NVIDIA choice appears to be the 7050PV, as it seems to enjoy known XvMC acceleration on MythTV's feature matrix and some have even reported getting it to work in a dual-head environment. The Intel cards should theoretically offer great performance for the power and enjoy good Linux driver support due to Intel's great contributions to X.Org, however Myth's wiki seems to know painfully little about the Intel GMA's. As far as XvMC support goes, Intel's chipsets don't seem to have a great track record.

So GeForce 7050 seems to be the most sane choice for those who are tired of fisticuffs with xorg.conf. But wait! We have audio to worry about too. If I'm going with a Shuttle GeForce 7050, then it looks like I'm going with a Realtek ALC888DD. Here again, MythTV notes that yet another Intel chipset is a true pain to work with. Still, I noticed that the MythTV hardware database notes there was at least one other Shuttle user with a similar setup that was able to get things to work.

Weirdly enough, both of the GeForce 7050 Shuttle boxes I found were AMD boxes. Go figure...

Empty Spaces

Yup, I'm still trying to work my way around Jini. This time it's JavaSpaces.

Apache River hasn't gone much farther from the last time I looked at it, but I liked the bare-bones reference implementation aspect. GigaSpaces seems a bit thick for my tastes and seems to be tightly coupled with their application server. I thought Blitz JavaSpaces might be a better fit, especially if I could use their fault tolerant edition.

I was able to get Blitz up and running then configured it to do unicast discovery to a pre-existing Jini registrar without a problem. I was having problems getting my client to connect in its security context, so I decided to dig a little deeper. As I did I also kept an eye towards fault-tolerance, but found that branch seemingly suspended. I later found a post from the author indicating he didn't really see a good motivation for moving forward with his fault-tolerance work:

In my spare moments I've been doing a re-implementation but the fact of the matter is that it's not a trivial problem to solve (though I believe I do have a solution). And here's the rub, this work doesn't pay the bills which means that it's going to take a long time to implement because I have to do a day's work first. For those who don't know, most of Blitz has been written during time between periods of employment - not over weekends and evenings as you might expect.
This presents me with a problem - users seem to want this feature but I'm struggling to see doing this as a good thing. Here's some of my reasons:

1. I'd be building a significant feature which will, judging by demand, make a lot of money for those who use it but zilch for me.
   
2. Not only do I earn nothing from this venture but I have to earn a significant amount of cash just to allow me time to develop the feature. Basically, I'd be financing everybody else's money making ventures.
   
3. One of GigaSpaces key value adds is the clustering/replication feature - they are fully commercial and need to earn a crust plus they're one of only a few credible companies that can provide corporate grade support for JavaSpaces. Were I to do this work for Blitz I'd maybe be damaging the market I've been helping to create.
   

Right now, I feel like the price of this piece of work is too high for me personally and for others in the commercial JINI world (and like it or not they are an important element in any future success for JINI). I can see why Blitz users might want this feature - they can avoid paying Gigaspaces a license for starters.

So... it seems like the development of an enterprise ready Blitz isn't in the cards. Casually strolling through Wikipedia's definition of a Tuple space brought up Fly Object Space, a tuple space that is not a JavaSpace implementation. While it doesn't fit into the Jini realm I know and love, it is a more minimalistic implementation of an object space that fits my desire of something smaller and to-the-point. It doesn't appear to support replication or fail-over on the non-commercial level, but I'm checking to see if there are plans to support it on a commercial level.

It's tough. I need an object space that has a minimalistic implementation, has a small footprint and can at least run active/passive for fault tolerance. Maybe I might have to dust off my old Terracotta instance and try out SemiSpace.

EDIT: Be sure and see Nati Shalom's comments following this post.

Suspend to RAM - Actually Works? Really?

Let it be known that today I was actually able to get my Linux laptop, using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers no less, to suspend to RAM. I'll give you a moment to pick yourself up off the floor.

Using a less-than-stock build of OpenSUSE 11.0, KDE 4.1.3, the latest NVIDIA drivers and a Dell Precision M6300 I was able to successfully both SUSPEND TO and RESUME FROM RAM. I crap you not. I even took a picture.

Wow. That's... like... historic.

Dark Power Adjusting Laptop Brightness

One reason why I was really looking forward to KDE4 was the level of abstraction it offered from services and hardware while offering a lot of unification as far as end-user interaction and desktop integration.

One fantastic example of this has become PowerDevil, which was introduced around the KDE 4.1 time but is now standard in KDE 4.2. Its functionality is based upon Solid, KDE4's hardware abstraction layer (which also abstracts audio & bluetooth).

PowerDevil runs as a fully-fledged KDE4 service, meaning it doesn't need to be some awkward "TSR" or persistent applet in your system tray. That also means that it runs much leaner than kpowersave, which largely monitored events and then attempted to send system calls along to the appropriate background resources.

The PowerDevil coders may talk down the control panel UI, but it works rather well. And while it doesn't have a Plasmoid (applet) yet or much in the way of UI, the beauty of KDE4 means it doesn't immediately need to. Since PowerDevil is well integrated into the KDE4 desktop, KRunner displays all the immediate options you need when you type "power profile" into the runner dialog. Very nice.

This kind of desktop integration is exactly what will make KDE4 a success in the long run, and it's great to see projects like PowerDevil emerge that take advantage of what KDE4, Solid and Plasma have to offer.

We Thank Thee, O Great NVIDIA...

All the way back in July I mentioned how slow and unstable KDE 4 is with NVIDIA, and why it's not their fault. Through August/September/October I've been living in a time warp and finally emerged out the other side... and behold! NVIDIA has graced our presence with a new driver release that has several KDE 4 compositing & Plasma fixes!!!

I clapped, I was so happy. Take pity on me.

Everything Breaks at Once

It seems that when one thing breaks, everything breaks. Ceiling starts leaking, TV loses convergence, power supply on computer goes out, server's UPS battery dies, the lithium battery pack for a portable DVD player starts to swell and explode, iPod ends up in the toilet, phone LCD cracks. It's partly because I'm over-tired and accidentally breaking crap, but it also appears that entropy has hit my living room en force.

I re-caulked the upstairs shower, replaced the TV, dug a new power supply out of the closet and got a new iPod. However - I've been busy with other stuff, so I haven't swapped the PSU in the workstation yet and I haven't completely re-installed all the home theater stuff, including MythTV box. And since I've already reduced every other electrical doodad in my house to its bare components, I might as well strip apart the Myth box and update it as well.

I have a pcHDTV card, now sitting dormant in the aforementioned workstation with a fried PSU. I'm thinking of ripping it out of the workstation and placing it into the MythTV Mini-ITX box. There's only room for one PCI card... so I'll have to remove the old Hauppauge cable TV tuner. Yet the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 is also the IrDA receiver for my remote control - so replacing the tuner card would mean losing the DVR's infrared receiver.

I started looking around for alternatives and found a whole slew of Linux-ready solutions. An easy solution that I didn't think of at first was using a generic HID Windows Media Center remote, since it just pretends to be a USB keyboard. Re-map the keycodes and you're pretty much ready to go... assuming you're willing to re-map a universal remote and the Myth keyboard bindings to accommodate the case-sensitivity.

One could also use the receiver from a SnapStream Firefly Mini - they appear to be well supported by MythTV and would be a nice out-of-the-box alternative, given that everything is ready to go. Hopefully the reports of limited range wouldn't be a problem given my spartan living room setup.

Of course, like every self-respecting home theater geek, I already have a programmable universal remote that controls my whole setup. I don't need the additional remote that the previous two solutions bring, so it seems unnecessary. The first thing I would do is throw away the packaged remote, re-program my Harmony 670 and just use the new IR receiver. So it probably makes sense to just buy the receiver if at all possible.

There is a fairly flexible Linux-happy USB infrared receiver/transmitter that is supported by recent versions of lirc and MythTV, but it might be more hardware than I need.

IguanaWorks makes some powerful receivers and transmitters as well, in both serial and USB flavors. Considering serial access is considered the "legit" way for IrDA access, it seems like the cleanest way to go. They are evidently fairly powerful and receptive, but I would still need to get an extension USB cable to rope around to the front of the MythTV box.

Another cottage shop sells a RS232 LIRC receiver built into a DB9 backshell. It's much cheaper and much lower profile and designed to work with lirc natively. The most simple solution to the problem it seems.

I'll probably wander around the local electronics shops looking for a Firefly Mini or MCE remote. If I can't find one this week I might put in an order for a serial port receiver. Never figured I'd use a 9-pin serial port again, that's for sure.

Massive Server Farms Can Equal Massive Failure

A quick trip over to the Amazon Web Service Status Page reveals that massive server resources don't exactly equate to massive uptime numbers. The S3 storage cloud has been down pretty much all day due to "an issue with the communication between several Amazon SQS components." This has affected both the EU and the US, causing some big headaches.

I'm not all that disturbed. I'm just happy that someone makes even bigger impacting gaffes than I do.

Where Are the Java Physics APIs?

If I'm going to try and port Deskblocks to Java then I'll need to find a native Java physics API. If my only choices are native libraries then it makes more sense just to stick to Qt 4 - I'd rather keep this entirely in the "compile once run anywhere domain." Managing native libraries with wrappers functions is just a pain in the butt.

I was surprised to see slim pickins for physics API. For 2D physics I just found Phys2D and for 3D physics I found JBullet, a port of the Bullet physics API. Both seem to be great projects, and both seem to be currently active. Indeed, I'll probably give Phys2D a try and see if I can use it. I guess I just expected an ODE port by now.

KDE 4 Really Fast, Except When It's Really Slow

I've enjoyed openSUSE 11.0 not necessarily because it works flawlessly, but because it's the best working install of KDE 4. KDE 4 has a lot of great potential, but it's not fully realized until you hit KDE 4.1. Since 4.1 is the actual version of KDE 4 meant for widespread usage, I've been downloading the unstable builds from SuSE's build service.

Things have been working fine except for one extremely nagging thing - the initial draw of a konsole window takes 5-10 seconds. It's extremely obnoxious, especially when you need a terminal so often.

I found out this was due to NVIDIA's drivers on newer boards - as described in the KDE techbase and illustrated in the Ubuntu forums and How-To's. Luckily it was an easy fix - running nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1 as root set the appropriate settings in the NVIDIA driver to allow windows to resize at the speed they should. But I don't necessarily blame NVIDIA - the blame deserves to be cast further.

The Linux Hater's Blog brings up a great point about Xorg not being about to allocate offscreen buffers - something that I didn't realize. Xorg lacks a memory manager, so all the stuff you need for full OpenGL support just can't be done. It simply can't be done with Xorg. All the points made in the rant are absolutely right - the memory management infrastructure for pbuffer and framebuffer objects have to be there, otherwise you're hosed.

The core issue that comes from this deficiency is that X11 in and of itself is inherently unable to support OpenGL. Lack of offscreen buffers means that all the great stuff you should be able to do directly in hardware can only be accomplished with a software renderer. Of course, this defeats NVIDIA's entire business model of making the GPU the most important part of your workstation. So they had to massively replace parts of X11; the NVIDIA Linux drivers must, by sheer necessity, replace huge chunks of the XOrg implementation.

After reading the Linux Hater's post a lot of other stuff made sense - why NVIDIA's drivers are so invasive, why you magically don't need to install Xgl to run Compiz Fusion if you are using the proprietary nvidia driver (because it already replaced Xorg for you, thanks), and why KDE's desktop effects had window resizing slowdowns.

NVIDIA didn't break things - they fixed things. They're just trying to live in our broken world.

Java DeskBlocks

Right before I started my latest hacking-for-cash endeavor I was working on DeskBlocks, a physics sandbox rendered directly on the desktop. I was using Qt 4 for development, mostly so I could use ODE and refresh my C++ coding. One problem in development was that things would work perfectly fine in X11 - rounded edges, nice circles bouncing around, render speed was great - then things would work horribly in Windows. Or vice-versa. I could never get things to behave properly cross-platform.

With Java's big update, it's windowing toolkit now allows for translucent and shaped windows on platforms that support it. That means the rendering issues I had with Qt 4 may be solved with Java 6u10.

It makes me start thinking if I should move the project to Java instead. It appears there are Java bindings for ODE... so it just might work.

Real-Life High Dynamic Range Lighting

I've been a sucker for HDR in gaming for a while now. So when I saw mention on Hack a Day about turning your point-and-shoot camera into a full-featured model that allows you to do stop-motion and high dynamic range photography my curiosity was piqued.

The Stuck In Customs HDR Tutorial gives a good reason why HDR photography can be so appealing: our eye adjusts constantly as it is observing its environment, quickly dilating and contracting the pupil to modify the range of light and color hitting the retina. HDR photography does the same thing, re-sampling the image to take in a varying amount of exposure and light at different depths of field.

Hack a Day turned me on to using the CHDK firmware add-on with a Canon SD870 IS. The CHDK add-on software allowed me to do exposure bracketing in continuous shooting mode.

Luckily HDR photography is all the rage lately, so I even had a Grumpy Editor's guide to HDR with Linux. It was great - it introduced me to PFScalibration and Hugin's image alignment, which are both nicely wrapped together in the fantastically easy to use Qtpfsgui toolkit.

Of course I had to turn the flash off and lower the resolution (to allow the continuous mode to write to the SD card faster), but in the end I had a perfect stack of images at varying exposures to import into Qtpfsgui. A tree turns into something more provocative pretty quickly:



I was amazed at the quality of open-source options for photography - Qtpfsgui was great for HDR, and Rawstudio was even more fantastic in dealing with my RAW digital negatives. The SD870 IS doesn't have native RAW file support, but thanks to CHDK and DNG4PS-2 I was able to quickly pull DNG files off of my SD card and start editing them in Rawstudio.

Unfortunately I don't have much if any time to try out new things, but this was a pretty pleasant diversion for the evening.

OpenSUSE 11.0 - Desktop Linux Actually Done Right

I've been pretty unhappy with SuSE Linux as of late. I thought 10.1 was well done, but subsequent releases were of poor build quality and in places just sloppy. There were times it began to show promise, only to fall just short.

I've been living inside of openSUSE 11.0 for the past several days, and tried out RC1 as well. All in all it's a very impressive distribution, and I'm surprised they were able to put this level of polish on KDE 3.5, KDE 4 and Gnome at the same time.

Package management, the Achilles' heel of SuSE up to this point, is scores better. YaST2 actually loads its package management tool quickly, and metadata indexing doesn't take decades like it used to. Compiz is nicely integrated, and KDE 4 is actually quite well done. I'm installing the unstable 4.1 packages right now, and we'll see how that looks as well.

There are some speed issues, but then again I'm using KDE 4 with desktop effects cranked up. However, the fixes to package management alone make SuSE a fantastic winner for the desktop Linux space. Honestly, once KDE 4.1 comes out I wouldn't be surprised at all to see more corporate desktops and developer machines turning to SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Counting on Trolls Under Your Bridge

It seems no matter if you're in a huge corporate project or a smaller cadre of independent developers, the rules of managing people and code remain the same. And open-source projects tend to manage people much better than their corporate brethren.

In projects with multiple people involved you have to continually worry about people leaving, contributing crappy code or going on a complete tangent. Usually in corporate life people just want the thing to work, and if it randomly happens to hit production and not have complete show-stopping errors, great. But the code could be complete cruft and no one would care.

With an open-source project, however, you must have complete transparency. Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman recently gave a presentation on managing people in OSS projects effectively. Code reviews, definite goals and communicating "just enough" were all key. Hrm... how many commercial software developers do the same thing?

It's not without its difficulties, however. Especially with the kernel, contributions can be a big mixed bag. Sifting the good contributions from the pointless ones can be time-consuming and tedious. So projects are split into more minute portions, and newbies are either mentored or given a sandbox to play in.

It seems like there is a role model out there for taking a wide variety of people with an even wider variety of backgrounds and time commitments and having them all contribute to a well-developed end product. It's a shame it isn't emulated more often.

Google Sites = The Reason for a Google Account

The whole reason I wanted to start developing on Google App Engine was because I wanted to start building a repository of code samples, How-To's, documentation, projects, blog posts, all that stuff. Something akin to Confluence. Google already did it for me.

Google just recently launched Google Sites, which basically becomes a content management system for whatever you like. It's exactly what I needed - and I'm planning on moving my docs, code snippets and projects over soon.

Wow... Actual Support! They Know We Exist!

Wanted to buy an album I had just discovered... but didn't want to haul myself to the neighborhood Best Buy. So I wanted to see if the band had an online purchase method. They didn't... but they sold through Amazon. I knew Amazon sold DRM-less MP3's, so I decided to check it out. For whole album downloads you are required to use their lil' download app, so imagine my aghast expression when I saw:

Sweet. Works only on 32-bit Linux (can work on 64 but has problems with library dependencies), but otherwise purchasing was swell. No issues.

Thanks Amazon for realizing Linux users buy music, too!

Spent

A while back I received this e-mail, completely out of the blue:

Wise men say, you only have to resign yourself to what you cannot improve

I'm not sure why I got the e-mail. Or who sent it. No real idea. Could well be spam. But it kinda stuck with me for some odd reason.

I've been working the 80 hour weeks lately, as promised. That means that I've had to give up working on my open-source projects. I feel real pangs of guilt when people ask for bugfixes or when the next release will come out... especially when users as kind as tomasio even volunteer their own time for icon assets. But I've cut sleep down to a few wee hours and just have nothin' left.

I'm hoping I can get everything going at work, get things on a stable foundation, then give myself free time once again. At least, that's the lie I tell myself.

Two Great Tastes - maemo & Qt

Fresh off the wire, it has been announced that Nokia will introduce Qt, my favorite C++ toolkit, to the maemo platform, my favorite portable hardware platform. Two great tastes that go great together.

If this kind of platform expansion and cooperation with Qt developers (such as KDE authors) is what will come of the Nokia acquisition of Trolltech, it may not be as bad as I predicted. Here's to hoping that Nokia sees Qt as a toolkit that will serve mobile, embedded and desktop platforms. Especially with the recent fame of low-cost low-footprint laptops, Qt and maemo have to be getting some additional attention.

If the WiMAX-enabled Nokia 810 becomes more powerful and popular, the addition of Qt and simplified cross-compiling could provide a huge increase of third-party applications hosted on an already open mobile device.

Java 6.9

Someone just directed my attention to the Java 6 update 10 intro on Sun's site. What the living...?

First off, this isn't a minor update. This is taking a backhoe to the foundations of Java, hitting a water line, but digging a basement anyway. Why this wasn't released in 7 I don't know... I guess it's because the update is largely centered around deployment of Java as a platform and not adding any functionality to the underlying API. But damn, it's an overhaul.

First, Java is now chopped neatly into libraries, so you only download what you need. That means Java installations can be one-third of what they were in the previous release. Java can now be downloaded and installed more efficiently as well, thanks to some much easier-to-use JavaScript and HTML-fu.

Konqueror has already done this for a while now, but applets will now execute within a full JVM instead of a half-baked nsplugin. This allows for more robust applets and, from my experience with Konqueror, plugins that are more crash-resistant.

Finally the fairly... blech... look of Java has been completely overhauled with Nibus, long at last. Previously I've had to use javootoo's Look and Feel libraries to make things look remotely presentable. Now Nimbus should be able to fill that gap nicely by adding more modern window decorations and UI components.

These were all desperately needed improvements to have Java make inroads into the desktop space. Let's hope it isn't too late.

Independent Horticulture

Another great invention by the creators of Penny Arcade: Greenhouse.

Steam has done a great job making independent and smaller titles much apparent to the populous, and since titles don't have to compete for shelf space a genre for every palate can be made readily available. And while CodeWeavers has done their best to allow Steam & Source titles to run on Linux & OS X, it can't be said that Steam is a cross-platform solution.

Not so with Greenhouse. It offers native support for OS X, Windows and Linux in tandem. And their inaugural title will be cross-platform. And if they continue to support independent and episodic titles, this could be a bigger competitor to Steam than GameTap.

Introversion's Procedural Art

The huge amount of effort required for content creation was a hot topic a couple of years ago, as many people saw the enormous cadre of artists and animators making AAA titles and realized no garage developers could hope to reach that type of scale. The fear at the time was that this would mean the end of indie development.

Of course after Peggle, Portal and Crayon Physics hit the mainstream it suddenly became apparent bigger doesn't equal better. Or more sales.

I've always loved the approach Introversion has taken with development. They're truly dedicated garage developers, spending more time trying to perfect a fractal tree than they really should. But I can respect spending an inordinate amount of time trying to wrap ones head around a concept like procedurally generated landscapes.

When I heard that Gamasutra was hosting an event with Chris Delay speaking on the topic of procedurally generated content, I definitely wanted to jump on the opportunity. While they had a fairly unrehearsed HP shrill asking the questions, Chris had some great points.

Chris emphasized that the main reason his titles have procedurally generated textures and meshes was because artistic content is just not a space he feels Introversion can compete within, since other companies have mastered that area. He saw it as neither a positive or negative thing, it's just the case for Introversion. Should artists be afraid? Chris doesn't think so. Procedural content cannot replace people, since it ultimately can't produce those unique items that make an environment distinct. While you can generate the landform that the world consists of (mountains, hills, streets, clouds, etc) it cannot add fine-grained details to the world.

You automagically gain several efficiencies with procedural content:

You don't have to re-draw or re-generate a scene if you need to modify level of detail

You end up with a large amount of content and detail that artists can't get (you can delve as deep as you want into a fractal)

If you do procedural animation, you can have adaptive animations that exist as a consequence to a number of actions

While the idea of using fractal algorithms for landscape generation or building trees, I hadn't thought much about procedural animation. Of course Spore uses it for their character builder, but introducing this as a new way of rigging meshes would again immensely help developers. Not needing an entire team of dedicated animators or texture artists would make things much more palatable.

There are tradeoffs of course, and Chris repeatedly mentioned that procedurally generated content requires a different way of thinking about memory management. Rather than loading assets off disk, you load them in memory at runtime - so you don't worry about texture compression, but you do now have to worry about LOD given to your algorithm and how much memory the resulting data structure will reside within. You can't let your procedure go willy-nilly and create too many verts.

Introversion's latest undertaking, Subversion, sounds interesting. Right now Chris describes it as more of a thought experiment, so who knows if we'll actually see it. But what he's pursuing is procedurally generating cities from 10 kilometer view all the way down to pens and desks inside a building. Not only does this employ a landscape generator for hills and mountains, but also will procedurally generate streets and buildings based on markets and traffic demand. Each procedural algorithm feeds its brothers, affecting its ultimate output. For example, more traffic makes more roads which can make bigger buildings.

One difficulty Chris found with this approach was that it was often ard to find out bad results - sometimes you would have cities being built on entirely one side of an area, with another being completely blank. Or sometimes a fire escape would open into nothingness on 30th floor. It's all a matter of finding a way to re-seed or compensate when these failures occur. Or maybe it just makes the whole concept quaint.

Intel Not Killing VPU After All

Looks like Intel isn't killing the VPU after all, but instead birthing it. Larrabee, their GPU/HPC processor, is supposedly an add-in proc slated for 2009/2010. Although I'm going to put myself out on a limb and say it will probably become part-and-parcel of their mainline CPU and, instead of being a discrete co-processor, will quickly be absorbed as additional cores of their consumer processor line. But I digress.

Additional information about Larrabee continues to trickle out, but it definitely seems to introduce vector processing instruction sets to be used by general computing, not just as a GPU.

Even if this comes out as a daughterboard or discrete chipset, it should be a compelling reason to pick up a good assembly programming book and start hacking again. How long will it take (non-Intel) compilers to optimize for the vector instruction sets?

Nifty Nokia

I'm really enjoying the n770. I'm definitely putting an n810 on my wishlist for the end of this year.

First thing I did was re-flash the device with OS 2007 Hacker Edition, an OS intended for the n800 but crammed into n770 hardware. It works rather well, only occasional reboots, but then again I'm working with a heavily used and refurbished unit. Who knows if it's the OS or the device. Google Talk, contacts, Bluetooth, 802.11b/g, a stripped-down mozilla engine and MPEG4 playback all works well.

I turned my lil' Nokia into a pocket translator with the Google Talk translator bot - the streamlined chat interface of OS 2007 turned the Nokia into a very handy (and quick) translation service.

Also tried to crack a test WRT54G router I have laying around using Aircrack, but I couldn't inject wifi packets using the OS 2007 wireless drivers so had to resort to the slower WEP cracking that needs a fair amount of seed traffic. It was still neat to browse all surrounding AP's on a full-screen xterm. With the n770's fantastic resolution, even the small typeface was definitely readable.

Also been mowing through a number of third-party apps. There is a fantastic developer community around the device - their Sourceforge-like approach to the Maemo Garage and the extensbility of the platform has served the developer and user community well.

It took me a while to find out what type of video the n770 will natively accept. There are several good resources out there, such as Andrew Flegg's Perl script that easily transcodes video into a n770-digestible format. The wide screen and nice resolution make mobile video much more palatable. The only caveat was that newer releases of MPlayer tag video with a newer but much less understood "FMP4" codec tag which OS2007HE doesn't understand. I had to tweak the script to pass the value "DX50" to the ffourcc option in order for the built-in media player to recognize the MPEG4 codec used. I also had to make sure encoding only happens at 15 frames per second, otherwise audio quickly gets out of sync.

When I get a free second I'm going to try getting some OpenVPN binaries to work as well. Would be very nifty to have an SSH stack and VPN access wherever I go.

Got Flash 9 somewhat working, although sound doesn't appear to work. Not a deal breaker tho, considering I'm working on a refurbished device running an unsupported OS meant for an entirely different hardware platform.

All in all, I'm a pretty happy gopher. Not sure what that means, but I am.

When $300 Is More Popular than Free

For the past two years digital delivery has supplanted shelf space, but those attached to selling physical inventory have poo-poo'ed the viability of such consumerism. But good ole' Trent may be proving that the merch sells itself once and for all.

The Reg puts it well when it says "Nine Inch Nails cracks net distribution" - their latest album has gone up for sale in several interesting ways on their site: get the first volume (nine tracks) for free. If you like it, you can buy all the volumes lossless (36 tracks) including a 40 page PDF booklet for a measly $5. For only ten stinkin' bucks you can get the whole thing as a two disc CD set with a printed booklet. For $75 you can get the audiophile version, digital versions, Red Book CD versions, hardcover slip case and more. Or you can pay $300 and get a super-mega-uber-limited-edition-collectors pack.

Or at least you could before all 2,500 sold out.

At a time when people keep claiming that pirated music is killing the industry and no one will pay for music anymore, it seems awful incongruous that 2,500 units at $300 a pop sold out in almost a day.

Same thing happened back in the day when I bought a copy of Uplink. I could buy it cheaply on its own or shell out some extra bucks and get the signed "limited edition." Of course I now have a proudly signed copy of Uplink on my shelf.

It's not hard to upsell customers, even (or especially) with digital distribution. Give them schwag and they will come.

A Rite of Passage

I purchased a well used Nokia n770 Web tablet from a friend last month and, as tradition dictates, I must christen the device by authoring an entire blog post using only said device.
It really is a sweet little device... and since it runs a Debian-derived distro I can do pretty much anything I want with it. From checking e-mail to WEP cracking it runs the gambit.
The screen is positively beautiful. Video on this thing makes me giddy. Plus I have more connectivity options than I can shake a stick at.
I can totally understand why the n800 has the following it does now.