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2004.05.27Site Update
New CMS + Now XHTML-1.0 STRICT
I've updated my site to use a newer CMS [as used on PostEverything and various other sites] and to use XHTML-1.0 STRICT and CSS. I think that some of the CMS generated content might break the HTML validation, so I'm going to work on that now.
I'm a bit late in the day bringing this site to use these standards, but it's a first step and I'll be doing the same to PostEverything over the coming months. The implementation for older browsers isn't as clean as I'd like, so I'll probably tweak that too.
Why no redesign? Well I like the design, the minimalism it, and rather than redesign it I thought I'd just add some new interfaces in future. Then people can choose what they see.
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2004.03.22
...remember that thingy we did with a green dotted chap dancing like a chava.
It won the creative award at The Revolution Awards on Friday,
so a big thankyou for your help on it from dare and me.
Cyrushttp://www.lynxpulse.co.uk
[Site appears to have been replaced with a newer version]
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2004.03.02
Windows Media Player HDWMV on Mac OS
It should work, it does work, but not quite...
I was looking at the Windows Media High Definition Content Showcase site the other day, and downloaded some of the files to check out on my PC. Very nice I thought. The 1080p files play very nicely on my 3Ghz/1Gb/Radeon 9800 (128Mb) system. I woudl have expected as much... but was that some articacting I saw? Just a little bit. Well never mind. It still looks pretty amazing!
Then my thought turned to my Mac. I've just got a new 1Ghz G4 Laptop. after an accident with my old TiBook. It's got 1.5Gb RAM and a ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 (64Mb) ... it's below equivalent spec of what's on the site for a PC but I thought I'd give it a whirl. The 720p videos did open, but didn't play at all efficiently. No surprise there.
So In turn I decided to try it on Adam at SHOWstudio's G5 tower. Dual 2Ghz with 1.5Gb RAM and ATI Radeon 9800 (128Mb) ... generally consdiered faster than most Pentium based machines. I donwloadede the .exe's [which are self extracting winzip files which Stuffit easily expands].The 720p file mostly played, with a couple of stutters where there were large changes on screen [a fade at the begining of one of the files]. With the 1080p it just didn't handle it.
Which seems a bit odd, given that the shorted pipeline [and I could be wrong here] in the PowerPC processors should be better for the kind of maths involved in video decompression. My conclusion is that Windows Media Player 9 for the Mac just isn't as well written. This might not be microsofts fault, it could simply be that it _can't_ be as well written because of the OS X environtment [again I could be wrong here] or it could be that it's intentionally not as well written for OS X.
I wonder if anyone has any more thoughts on this?
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2004.02.06
I've just been <a href="http://www.ntk.net/2004/02/06/">NTK'd</a>
though that should be all.your.name/are/belong/to/us
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2003.12.10
Problems reading burnt ext2 DVDs
Eric Waters suggests it might be a block size issue
I've not had anyproblems with a block size of 1024, but Eric said he checked it out and 2048 was the appropriate blocksize for DVDs, so that might be it
I found your website in a google search for info on burning DVD's in
Linux. After following your instructions, I was able to nicely burn an
unmountable ext2 DVD. The problem, I discovered (through the help of
http://www.linux.net.nz/lists/NZLUG/2003/07/1243.html), is that the DVD
is burned with a sector size of 2048k, so therefore the blocksize of the
ext2 image (created with dd and mke2fs) must be 2048, *not 1024*.So, instead of:
dd \
if=/dev/zero \ # read input for file from /dev/zero
of="ext2_file" \ # output file
bs=1024k \ # file has block size of 1024k [1 Megabyte]
count=4096 # file has 4096 blocks [4 Gigabytes]mke2fs \
-b 1024 \ # block size
-F \ # Force [I shouldn't have to use this, but I do]
ext2_file # input file... it should be this:
dd \
if=/dev/zero \ # read input for file from /dev/zero
of="ext2_file" \ # output file
bs=2048k \ # file has block size of 2048k [2 Megabytes]
count=2048 # file has 2048 blocks [4 Gigabytes]mke2fs \
-b 2048 \ # block size
-F \ # Force [I shouldn't have to use this, but I do]
ext2_file # input file?You might want to add this to the webpage so others don't burn a coaster
like myself.Eric Waters
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2003.10.04
The Royal Armouries
Information Architecture and Design
So, this has been ongoing for a couple of years, but it's finally live [well a few weeks ago].
A few bits of the design and HTML I provided for the site build seem to have been broken during implementation of the CMS, eleventeenth are taking on board all the feedback about the problems and sorting them out pretty quickly. I wish I had had more time to give feedback during the beta phase, so sort of my own fault. Now we wait for the armouries to produce the content!
Another empty wrapper.
I'm also aware that this goes against my ethics against violence and war, but I don't feel this is a celebration of war, rather than a study of it. The same contradiction exists in that I'm interested in Martial Arts, and enjoy a good explosion. I'm just against un-necessary violence were it is subjected upon innocent people. And so are the Armouries.
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2003.08.26
Norman Jay - Good Times
videoblogging from notting hill carnival
http://www.showstudio.com/projects/jay/jay_start.html
I spent the bank holiday weekend mostly working on this. SHOWstudio arranged for two photographers to go out each day of carnival to send back the experience via mobile phones. I've already developed the software to publish photographs to the web, some simple perl scripts. But for this we also wanted to use a 3G video phone.
First of we got sent some NEC e606 handsets. Whilst these were quite compact and OK to use, there is no email client in them, so getting them of required getting them to another phone and then offloading them to a computer. Done using some windows software supplied by NEC, whcih was a bit awkward. I wanted to automate the process so we got hold of some NEC e808 handsets which have an email client that can send attachments. So we could get video to the server no problem.
A few experiments at a Squarepusher gig proved that whilst the video was interesting the sound wasn't so hot when the volume was high. We also had music that we wanted to use and so it seemed like a good idea to strip out the sound from the MP4 files that we received from the phone. I thought this would be pretty trivial as I could just load the files into QuickTime and strip them - this is easy to do in QuickTime Player. Obviously that's no good on Linux though.
So I looked at what was available for Linux and, as expected, was disappointed. There are several solutions for playing video and loading codecs, but the libraries are scarecly documented [that I could find] and few utilities exist. I naively assumed that the quicktime file structure would be quite simple and therefore easy to manipulate, but some investigation has proven me wrong. Having since delved more into QuickTime's API and features I can understand why it might not be worth trying to do more than video playback.
I dove into the QuickTime Java API thinking that the solution might lie there, and initial reads made me feel quite confident that I could write a Java app to do the work. So I set about working out how to get a Mac server that I could run the app on. I ended up putting my G4 laptop into Internet Vision's rack at RedBus for a few days.
And set about writing QTDemux.java ... I've discovered a few things about QuickTime and QuickTime for Java along the way:
QuickTime is a very powerful toolset.
The document format is overly complex.
The Java API is very poorly documented.But I managed it.
And then strung together some front end interfaces using SMIL, and discovered that it was too heavy at the front end. QuickTime Player seems to suffer quite badly when you are trying to do quite trivial SMIL work. I can see this being down to the difference in model between SMIL and it's own document format. The thing is that these should essentially be the same thing, and therefore I can't understand why it's not. I think I maybe have a DOM mode of the QuickTime in my head, one that could be simplified, and would map to the DOM that exists in SMIL as well.
There have been several itterations of what I wanted to do with the videos. I wanted to get across an idea of the 'everything going off' feeling I've had when I've gone to carnival. I decided to arrange the videos in a grid and control them using SMIL. I'd alternate between still images [pulled out by the QTDemux app] and video. Maybe play 2 videos at once. They were only small [<12 seconds, 174 x 144, 2.5 fps, MP4, <100k]. And a soundtrack.
That's asking too much. It sort of works. But audio doesn't. Trying to play music along side just stuttered on my iBook. And I reckon that's probably going to be the case with most users. So I changed my approach and removed the music. But as the number of clips increased, quicktime carried on slowing down. I tried to stagger the loads, so that images loaded at different times, but eventually resigned to the fact that - as I knew already, but hoped the situation had improved - I needed to simplify it. So we've now just got the videos pulled in reverse chronological order with a random soundtrack. Simple, but I think it's still a nice mood.
Gerald Jenkins was given the NEC e808 video phone, and a Nokia 3650 for stills. He was also given a back stage pass to the Good Times stage, so that he could film Norman Jay and what was going on around him. His stills are the monotones on the site, taken as colour and then passed through Perl::Magick. Gerald was around the stage on both days of the carnival, and towards the end was starting to feel limited with the video phone towards the end, and I can understand that. Whilst downloading and playing back videos on the phone is quite impressive, the video functions aren't all that yet for recording, and the frame rate can be annoyingly low. That combined with cramped conditions and a quite ugly handset [the silver e808 looks like a compact. And I mean the kind for make up]. It's going to take some getting used to. The other stills on the site were taken with a Nokia 7650, published straight out to the site. I enjoyed the contract between the different photographers on the project. That's something you'll have to take in by looking at it.
Easy peasy once the pieces are in place.
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2003.06.30
Adventures in MobLoging
or mblging or whatever catchphrase is appropriate.
In preperation for sorting out SHOWstudio's MMS to web gateway I've tidied up the code I wrote last december to allow me to post to my site via my mobile phone. It's a pretty simple perl script which executes via a pipe when mail is received, and files any attachments and inserts the contents of the message into a DB.
I've got it set up to post to MoveableType. Probably could be set to post to other blogging tools as well. Hmmmmm.
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