Monthly Archives: July 2002

JavaStation/Linux from the Qube 2

Posted by on 31Jul02 Comments Off

It’s not as easy as I thought, mainly due to the total lack of a working rarp/tftpd setup – NFS can be bodged. A list of what I did is available should anyone else want to try.

Of course, it’s not fully working yet in that the tftp stage was causing me problems last night, but there’s now an updated in.tftpd on the system so it should all ‘just work’ when I switch it on tonight… The page describes the steps needed to build the various utils to get the system booting, but not in too much detail – the steps that are show are mainly to help me do things in the right order should I need to redo it.

Of course, NetBSD 1.6 would solve all of this at a single stroke (yes, I know 1.5.3 is out, but it seems silly to jump now, given the amount of work required to migrate the web sites and users over to any new setup).

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Messing with Groupware/distributed development

Posted by on 30Jul02 Comments Off

Whilst I’m in a posting mood, has anyone else played with distributed programming/development from the ‘sharp’ end ?

I’ve been looking at packages such as Horde and PHPGroupWare, and they are fascinating – immense amounts of effort have gone into them, and I’ve simply no idea if they work as-is for real work, or if each team modifies them to suit their working practice.

Has anyone set one of these up before a project was running ? Did it make more sense to spend less time messing with the code, and more time getting basic documentation and procedures in place so that the workers conformed to the code ?

I’ve also just discovered (ok, had pointed out to me :) the power of the CVS commitinfo, rcsinfo and editinfo scripts in the $CVSROOT/CVSROOT directory. Now all I need to do is get my head around something like BugZilla, and I’ll be able to roll-my-own version of cvstrac !

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Running live with b2

Posted by on 30Jul02 Comments Off

Ok, I’ve decided that it’ll be easier to cut over to b2 and worry about missing data from the last site than wait until I’m 100% sure that it’s all transferred

Other stuff like the posting page and any sort of b2 housekeeping areas are yet to be modified into something approaching my design, but then no-one is going to bother posting besides me, are they ?

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video capture part three: what to do next

Posted by on 24Jul02 Comments Off

win2k/sonic mydvd

There will be some details here, just as soon as I can stop screaming at the memory of it all…

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video capture part two: getting it working

Posted by on 24Jul02 Comments Off

win2k/tmpgenc

The answer to the AVI capture limit was simple: move to Windows 2000 and NTFS, and capture until my hard drive ran out of space. This was good, in that it worked fine, plus the move to MPEG files rather than AVI meant that there wasn’t really a limit anyway. The O/S was far, far better than Win98 in terms of stability, and the Task Manager that could be invoked by a simple CTRL+ALT+DEL was a delight: I could bring the system down to the bare minimum of executing tasks in a moment.

The only slight problem was that the quality of the MPEG-2 captures I was getting wasn’t as good as I’d hoped for. Sure, it blew the MPEG-1 stuff away, especially on motion scenes as the macroblocks were that much smaller, but it still didn’t make me go: Wow !

In order to get the best quality I could, I then started to capture with VirtualDub and the HuffyUV codec with conversion to SVCD via the rather handy TMPGEnc program. Back when I started doing this the software was struggling into Beta 12 (I think I found it a little earlier) and an English translation was a separate patch to the original software. After much searching I ended up with a DVD player too: a Pioneer 525 simply because it would playback CD, CD-R, CD-RW, VCD, SVCD, oh, and DVD too.

Now I was getting somewhere – the interlaced playback, and the generously blurry nature of a TV set rather than a monitor meant that the stuff I could put onto SVCD (via Nero, a superb CD writing program) was getting distinctly watchable.

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video capture: the first steps

Posted by on 24Jul02 Comments Off

beos/hauppauge wintv

Hmm, well that was nice. It’s a wonderful OS, bringing elegance and slickness to the desktop of even ‘slow’ machines, if you can find a selection of hardware with the correct drivers. It can do multiple video and audio streams that even today’s O/S have trouble with, and the default versions even came with Japanese localisations – how about that for a US company ?

Well, not so great, actually. There was an unfinished BT8x8 video capture app. that came with some of the later versions, and if pressed it could cope with PAL and 25fps, but for some reason, despite contacting the author and having quite a few exchanges with him, there was never any move to cope with European audio, particularly NICAM. The stills of Emma from 1999 were grabbed via the Hauppauge WinTV card and this driver, but I could only ever get AM audio decode to give intelligble sound, but AM decoding an FM signal isn’t a recipe for CD quality audio…

Would I have stuck with it otherwise ? Maybe. I never managed to get as far as sorting out an editor for capture footage, and perhaps (given the lifespan of Be) that wasn’t such a bad thing. I’ve still not found a better filing system though, <sniff>…

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Random colourfulness

Posted by on 24Jul02 Comments Off

Thought it might be nice to have a break from monochrome

Not that I dislike white/grey/black of course (and it is in keeping with the rest of the site), but a random dose of colour in a subtle way makes things more amusing. It also helps to see if you are stuck behind a transparent web proxy that isn’t updating properly (*cough*NTL*cough*).

Not sure how bad they’ll look on 8-bit displays, as (thankfully) I don’t have to suffer that indignity much these days – it’ll be a quick tweak to the array if they do seem too bad, if I get around to testing it…

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