Category: Geek

eWeek reports: “A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed.”

I also loved how Allchin tried to make the point that Sun, by encouraging Java use, is discouraging interoperability. Orwell would be proud.

Remember when audiophiles went nuts about the fact (or claim?) that you could improve the fidelity of audio CDs by drawing a ring around the outer track with a green marking pen? The practice has returned, but for different reasons. Now it’s being used to defeat CD copy protection.

Breakthrough tonight: Succeeded in taking a live video stream from DV camera and spitting it to the web in real time. The final setup will look like this:

camera –> mixing board –> G4 w/coolstream –> win2k w/qtss –> world

The mixing board will let us add titles and do fades etc. on a live video stream. It outputs analog, so we need an analog capture card for the Mac. CoolStream on the Mac takes the stream and resizes / resamples in real time, generates an SDP (streaming description protocol) file, and unicasts the stream to Darwin Streaming Server 4 (DSS4) running on a dedicated Win2K box. The SDP file gets moved to the DSS4 box as well. DSS4 then multicasts the stream to the world, all with a 7-second buffer delay (almost half the latency of Real or WinMedia).

Since you can’t embed an SDP file in a web page, you make a fake .mov file that references the SDP, then embed the fake mov in a web page.Have been fiddling with this stuff for a while, felt great to make it finally happen.

Still a good amount of fiddling and purchasing to do. Amazingly, there is currently no broadcasting software for OSX on the market, so you have to do the capturing under OS9. Apple will be releasing free broadcaster when they get the licensing crap worked out with MPEG-LA. So we’ll switch from CoolStream to that when it’s ready. I’d be running QTSS under OSX as well, but it would mean buying another Mac, and we already have this Win2K box ear-marked for media serving.

Note to self: When you teach this PHP/MySQL class next semester, make damn sure that all the students name their tables and columns *exactly* like I do in the examples. I kind of assumed they would, but they took a lot of liberties tonight, stretching their wings, and chaos reigned for the second hour as we debugged one broken script after another. Which would be fine one-on-one and is actually kind of educational, but takes a lot of time away from the rest of the class.

Second note to self: If you try to videotape something (like this class, since some of the students couldn’t be there tonight) and the camera has an audio shoe on it, remember that its presence overrides the built-in mic and you either have to remove it or plug in an external mic. I just taped two hours of silent lecture. Doi.

Other than that, the class is going great. They’re starting to get it, and seeing real results pop out gets them jazzed.

They’re selling off the domain now. Another nail in the coffin… Amazing that I get so much email from people asking how and whether I’m going to help with the open source efforts, whether I still use BeOS, etc. Just freaks me out that there are so many people willing to hang on to invisible coattails for so long.

Something lives, something dies. I’ll walk with the living, thanks very much.

One upon a time, if someone at work got a new computer, someone else would come over to see how fast it was. “Do a DIR!” they would say. And they would do a DIR and watch the directory listing scroll by (this is before Windows) and if it scrolled by faster than on their own workstation, be jealous. Amazing that that was actually considered a worthy benchmark when 386/16s roamed the earth.

This random, pointless memory brought to you by the Dept. of Random Pointless Memories.

Wanna see something scary? Run Aquisition for a while, so you’re established on the network (I suppose LimeWire would work too). You don’t have to do or host anything, just run it. Now install tcpflow, which is like tcpdump, but shows you *everything* passing through your network and run

sudo tcpflow -i en0 -c

Congrats — You’re a porn portal! Or at least the rest of the world is trying to treat you like one. Discovered this by accident when my router lights were going crazy and tcpdump showed so much traffic I thought I was being DOS’d or something. Forgot I had left Aquisition running. tcpflow output tipped me off that something wasn’t right, since there are no brittney or “naked teen” refs on betips.

Here is a tremendous set of resources put together to defend keeping Macs in schools rather than standardizing on Wintel. It’s been interesting seeing how things go at the J-School, which is about 50/50. Faculty and staff have a mix of Macs and PCs. Students have “The Greenhouse,” which is a room of 12 fully-decked-out G4s where we teach web design, video production, audio production, Quark, and pretty much anything creative, and two “Newsrooms” full of PCs where students basically do word processing.

It’s clear from interacting with students and faculty over the past four months that MacOS is less confusing overall (I know that’s vague and fuzzy, but it seems to be true) and that we do far less support work on the Macs (which is empirically true).

Just observations, not trying to start a flame war… ;)

Figured out today how to make phpmyadmin run multi-user (like it might through an ISP) so I can have students in my webdb class use phpmyadmin for their class projects without being able to see the databases that drive the main site.

Interesting that a netcraft lookup on betips shows the whole history of server/platforms I’ve run the site against, from poorman (unknown) through apache/bone, apache/linux, apache advanced extranet, apache/darwin. Sort of like my web server is keeping its own blog ;)