2008年 1月 24日
Posted in Debian, GDC 2008, LCA08, Linux, Micro Forté at 10:33 pm by TBBle (Visited times)
Good news! Having worked for most of the traditional Christmas break, I'm now going to to linux.conf.au 08 in Melbourne next week, and Game Developers Conference 2008 in San Francisco in late February.
CAPSLOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY GIRLY DELIGHT
For those of you who don't already realise, my dream job since age six was to be a video games programmer. Having now achieved that, you'd figure I was now in for karmic mortgage payments for a while. And sure enough, having an umbilical hernia become quite painful on Friday night, 28th of December (I was working that day) would certainly seem to be within reach. I'd actually had the hernia for a couple of months, I reckon, but hadn't known what it was or what to do with it. (I thought I was just getting fatter. -_-) Anyway, a mix of mentos, Coca-cola, lifting a heavy TV that week and who knows what else ended up with me spending the night in hospital on morphine. (Well, I dunno if I was on morphine all night. They gave me some) Thankfully, the surgeon registrar was able to push the bits of bowels sticking out back in (before the morphine. -_-) without problem, and no problems appeared overnight, so I'm now waiting for the letter to let me join the waiting list for surgery, and occasionally stopping to push bits of my bowel back through my belly-button.
This means I'm no longer a hospital virgin (not that I really was. I went to hospital when I was three years old or so, to get my forehead stitched up after falling off the wall above our driveway in Oyster Bay, Sydney) but it was a scare that I wouldn't be able to go to LCA this year, having already booked and paid for it, and LCA being my main actual holiday each year.
Also, it was lucky my sister was in town, since when I told her where and how it hurt, her mind went straight to hernia, so she and my mother came over to check me out and took me to hospital, hours earlier than I would have gone myself.
Anyway, early last week I saw the surgeon consultant, and he said I'd be fine to travel, since the surgery was fairly far off in the future anyway ("several months" I believe) and as long as I don't put sustained lateral strain on my abdomen, I'll be fine.
He also said to lose weight, of course.
So yeah, I reckon that the hernia prolly balances out LCA, GDC, my job, and maybe even my paying off of the ATO this year. I hope the universe agrees, 'cause if I'm still in the red for those good things, I'll have to be sure to backup my new laptop before I travel.
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Last modified 2008年 1月 28日 @ 8:27 pm
2007年 6月 20日
Posted in Clubs, Japan, Japanese, Linguistics, Micro Forté, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, University at 3:58 am by TBBle (Visited 26 times)
For reasons which I suspect are more due to the purchase of のだめカンタービレ 特典 のだめの鍵盤ポーチ付き than DS陰山メソッド 電脳反復 正しい漢字かきとりくん and 漢字そのまま DS楽引辞典, Amazon has emailed me to recommend this:
Now, my Japanese is not exactly spectacular, and rikaichan proved unhelpful as well, but this appears to be to be a 3-month exercise cartridge for women to increase their 女ヂカラ. As the joke goes, you fuck just one goat...
(Japanese is my best non-native language, too. My knowledge of Modern Standard Chinese currently extends only to 你有好乳房 "You have excellent breasts" and 你的妹妹有十六歲嗎 "Is your sister 16?", although if pressed occasional other words, interspersed with Japanese and the occasional mumble will emerge. ^_^)
Now of course I need to go assert my masculinity by buying something like this:
(The infamous witch touching game)
Granted, I'd have bought this game whether Amazon was trying to make me buy girly things or not and I realise that my other purchases (Kakitorikun, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon DVDs, for example) may have given Amazon the impression that I was a female Japanese primary-school student, but seriously, who gives a credit card to an eight-year-old girl named Paul?
Of course, my last AmazonJP shipment went to a female friend who was in Japan, maybe they assume I've been pretending to be a foreigner all this time to avoid sales tax? (Which is the opposite of online games, where I usually claim to be from very very south Okinawa, on the grounds that they don't actually ask what country you're from, just which prefecture of Japan.... This isn't a problem, both because I am roughly south of Okinawa, and because Japanese MMOs lost their appeal to me once I realised that the Japanese seem to produce nothing but grinding MMOs.)
On that topic, I was disappointed to see that the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms MMO, at least from the two gameplay videos posted on YouTube, looks like another grinder. A translation of a beta test announcement however suggests that some level of facitonality will enter into it. Shame, really. ROTK would have been an excellent setting for the MMO I've been dreaming of creating. And sadly, the link to Dynasty Warriors Wave on the Wii is still not actually a link, at the Koei site. They showed this at the Tokyo Games show in 2005. And after the wonder experience The Godfather turned out to be, I was so looking forward to uniting China under the kingdom of Wu with nought but a pair of chakrams, a Wiimote, and the sweat of my brow (and other body parts). I guess I'll just have to grab Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle when it ships somewhere in English.
I just now finished watching Dexter, (Warning, Wikipedia article contains unmarked spoilers) which I enjoyed quite a lot. I have to say though, I'd have been frustrated to be watching it week by week. And the second half of the season involved me yelling at him a lot for being an idiot.
Oh, and I joined Mensa the other day. I've spent all week telling people I'm a card-carrying genius, which is a bit of an exaggeration, as I don't know if I get a card (I've been too busy to check my post office box.)
Just to reinforce my genius status, I tonight completed all the character writing and drills for the grade 1 of Kakitorikun. That's 80 kanji, and technically I've got an academic transcript that says I know several hundred, but... yeah. That's not as impressive when I write it down, it turns out my level of Japanese approaches that of an particularly uncommunicative six-year-old. But I have gotten a stamp for every day this month so far. ^_^
I get proud about completely the wrong things, sometimes.
In somewhat more age-appropriate educational news, I'm finally getting back to uni this coming semester, taking Morphology part-time. Work's pretty good about flexible hours and stuff, so this will hopefully only consume time from my life, rather than life from my veins, as per my previous attempts at part-time study. It helps that this time I'm not travelling interstate to work and further again to study. However, I think I'm going to have to withdraw from the ANUAS comittee, as I'm going to be even more pressed for time than I am now.
If anyone from the ANUAS exec is reading this, sorry. I'll prolly make an official announcement this week, although given the way things are going, that's about as reliable as everything else I've promised I'd do for the exec.
At least this won't crimp my social life. My social life couldn't be crimped by an angry hairdresser with an AK-47 crimping iron, since it's basically completely absent.
If only I could find an amazonian smart Japanese chick who digs me... Although frankly, I'm flexible on nearly all those details.
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Last modified 2007年 7月 4日 @ 12:21 am
2007年 5月 1日
Posted in Anime, Clubs, Japan, Japanese, Micro Forté at 12:00 am by TBBle (Visited 107 times)
Assuming 8 equals 6, it takes the Milky way most of a day to travel as far as light does in a minute.
Just in case you were wondering...
Oh, and server upgrades mean the blog's back online and working. ^_^
I've recently become quite entertained by Nodame Cantabile, having been flicking through a donated volume of English-language manga and then quite co-incidentally seen the first episode of the anime at an ANUAS executive show-selection screening.
So I was quite surprised to see that the recently-released NDS game... existed. I was subsequently surprised to see it at number four in the weekly Japanese video game charts.
At this point unsurprisingly, but still very pleasingly, there turns out to be a live-action series too (predating the anime) which I'll be looking long and hard at including in next semester's ANUAS drama screenings.
I also bought SSX Blur for the Wii on the weekend, as well as borrowing the work copy of Need For Speed: Carbon. Both games are by EA, and both suffered the same control problem, namely that the nunchuck-rolling movement only registers properly if you hold the nunchuck with your wrist fully extended on top. (ie stick your thumb out as far as you can, and then make it parallel to your forearm, palm facing inwards. That sort of wrst position.) This of course works fine when you think about it, but it's not the natural position for the nunchuck, nor is it particularly comfortable.
That of course was not the only problem I hit. NFS: Carbon I found very very very frustrating to play, as the cars would tend to get stuck to a wall, and then come off only to hit the other side at an even sharper angle. Shifting into reverse with an auto gearbox also seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, leading to the situation where if I hit any wall on the course, I couldn't win. Granted, I'm not that good at driving games, so I wasn't exactly expecting the gaming experience of a lifetime, but even so I enjoyed NFS: Underground 2 on the Xbox a lot more.
SSX Blur, on the other hand, was a sharp disappointment. As well as the nunchuck issue, the other problem was that the Ubertricks seemed to be unwarrantedly difficult to pull off. I only managed to get the movement recognised in-game twice, and only once was I far enough off the ground by that point to actually be able to hit the button to end the trick and land. Seriously, this game element could have been saved by simply dimming the screen the button was held down, slowing time, and showing the player the movement the Wii was reporting, rather than continuing to hurtle downhill at breakneck pace while trying to draw Zs and love-hearts in the air.
However, the biggest gameplay disappointment in SSX Blur (Compared to the last one I played, SSX Tricky, against on the Xbox) is the loss of the character chat. It was a great gaping hole in the game that I could no longer enjoy the continuous mutterings of the character (Kaori, in my case, who used to chatter away in Japanese) and was in fact hearing nothing but the sound of board on snow and the inane pseudo-surfer sound of the DJ.
Also, the DJ was very annoying. >_<
The other major loss in SSX Blur was the rider customisation options. In SSX Tricky, I worked repeatedly over the various competitions and challenges, trying to save up enough money to buy the many many many neat, cool and downright weird rider outfit components available. There was something about unlocking peaks and whatnot, but seriously, I don't care that much about snowboarding that I'd take the game as its own reward.
Fast-forward to SSX Blur, and after winning three races and one 1 on 1 challenge, I was first on the leaderboard, and had unlocked the second of 25 sets of skis/boards and 0 extra outfits. That's 0 extra, I still had the one I started with. Out of four! Seriously. Four outfits? And they were whole outfits, not the mix-and-match fun of SSX Tricky.
I will concede that snowballs were an interesting new feature in SSX Blur. But there's only so many snowballs you can throw at your opponents before you miss the ability to board into the shop and buy a cuter and fluffier backpack.
I'll be trading in SSX Blur tomorrow for The Godfather: Blackhand Edition, since I believe I'm less than six hours away from finishing The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess and The Godfather got good reviews on the Wii. I'm a little apprehensive though, as it is another EA game... If they turn out to have fizzled the controls in this one too, Wing Island is an option. If I keep swapping games around, I'll either find something good, or one of the holy trinity (Super Smash Bros Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy or Metroid Prime 3: Corruption) will ship.
Speaking of video games, a friend of mine will be in Japan next month, so I'll be taking the opportunity to score some NDS games to help with my Japanese.
I've attached AmazonJP links to the DS games I'm considering... I'd love to hear some thoughts and feedback on these or other suggestions... I'm particularly keen on some kind of fairly simple kanji learning/memorisation game, and something I can scribble kanji into and get dictionary lookups from.
I'll be modchipping my Wii soon, so any suggestions on Japanese-released Wii games that'll be playable with my remarkably poor command of the language would be appreicated too. ^_^
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Last modified 2007年 5月 1日 @ 12:00 am
2007年 3月 1日
Posted in Debian, Linux, Micro Forté at 6:54 pm by TBBle (Visited 113 times)
(Side note: Due to 410549, some kind of PHP4/Apache2 bug in Debian/Stable that WordPress 2.1 has triggered, this site's not loading fully. It's apparently only happening on Debian, and upgrading PHP4 to the Dotdeb 4.4 build fixes it, apparently. >_<)
Anyway, here's an entry in my "Why everything that isn't apt sucks" category.
[root@bookcase ~]# yum info kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Available Packages
Name : kernel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 16 M
Repo : updates
Summary: The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)
Description:
The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any
Linux operating system. The kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system: memory allocation, process allocation, device
input and output, etc.
Name : kernel-devel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 4.7 M
Repo : updates
Summary: Development package for building kernel modules to match the kernel.
Description:
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.
[root@bookcase ~]# yum install kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 set to be installed
--> Running transaction check
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 set to be erased
--> Running transaction check
Dependencies Resolved
=============================================================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
=============================================================================
Installing:
kernel-devel i686 2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 updates 4.7 M
Removing:
kernel-devel i686 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 installed 14 M
Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install 1 Package(s)
Update 0 Package(s)
Remove 1 Package(s)
Total download size: 4.7 M
Is this ok [y/N]: Y
Downloading Packages:
(1/1): kernel-devel-2.6.1 100% |=========================| 4.7 MB 00:21
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing: kernel-devel ######################### [1/2]
Cleanup : kernel-devel ######################### [2/2]
Removed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6
Installed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.19-1.2911.fc6
Complete!
[root@bookcase ~]# yum install kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Nothing to do
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
package kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 is not installed
[root@bookcase ~]# wget http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm
...
11:36:50 (141 KB/s) - `kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm' saved [17169362/17169362]
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -i kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6
[root@bookcase ~]# yum info kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Installed Packages
Name : kernel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 46 M
Repo : installed
Summary: The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)
Description:
The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any
Linux operating system. The kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system: memory allocation, process allocation, device
input and output, etc.
Name : kernel-devel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 14 M
Repo : installed
Summary: Development package for building kernel modules to match the kernel.
Description:
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.
This all started when I tried to build a kernel module for the default Fedora Core 6 kernel on a fileserver at MF, only to find that the version magic didn't match, as I had an i586 kernel but i686 headers. No matter the cajoling, I couldn't get it to install an i586 set of headers, or an i686 version of the running kernel. I gave in and figured that due to a security issue, the old 2.6.19 kernel had been retired and the new kernel (2911) was the only one in the repositories.
Which led me to try the above. Clearly, yum agrees there's a kernel image RPM and kernel headers RPM available, both i686, but bizarrely is completely ignoring any requests to install it. And I mean ignoring, no error, no failure, it's as if I haven't listed the pacakge.
Sure enough, grabbing the RPM directly from the mirror and installing it with rpm worked fine.
And just to keep the hate flowing, the default setup of Yum is awful. There's no Australian mirrors in the mirror rotation, so I was getting 20kB/s before thinking to take away its mirror list and force it to use mirror.aarnet and suddenly getting the full effect of our two-megabit-per-second link. And before I did that, if I changed my mind about an operation that was busy fetching things from the network, control-c would kill the fetcher, and yum would then proceed to try the next mirror in the list. The default installation contains a huge list of mirrors (fetched from the Fedora website) which now I look at it, does start with mirror.aarnet, although it also then tells me it couldn't find any mirrors to match AU, despite having just given me one, and lists mirrors all over the shop. And it certainly never seemed to be using one when told to fetch something.
In Yum's defense, I will say that it survived being backgrounded and kill -9d on several occations. ^_^
Speaking of changing mirrors, it doesn't notice when you tell it to use a different mirror, and won't invalidate its cached metadata, meaning it'll reject the downloaded primary.xml.gz. When this happens, it still doesn't clear its metadata, meaning if you try it again, it'll fail again.
I feel better, having vented that. And I can hardly wait until we can whack this server and make it a nice Debian box, like all the rest of the systems in here (bar one FC4 box which only has one task, but happens to be in the DMZ...).
OK, one more thing. The Yum instructions say you can upgrade Fedora Core using Yum, but don't. And it'll only go one version at a time, and the box was an FC4 box in need of serious love. So I loved having to grab a four-gigabyte DVD to upgrade a server which is actually less than four gigabytes of system... It would have been quicker to image everything but our data, and FTP that to someone who already had the DVD. Except that it had to come back too. And it turned out to have, for a server, an incredible amount of crap on it. (I've this afternoon removed kde, gnome, metacity, cups, evolution, firefox...) This machine is Raided, backed up and was never ever going to be someone's desktop machine. (I hope).
Although I now understand why there are people who want to upgrade Sarge to Etch, and start by downloading the 8-CD weekly Etch image. And in fact I had someone two weeks ago who was going to install Sarge, didn't have a good Internet connection, and was asking if there was a better way than grabbing two DVD images.
In case you're wondering, the kernel module I wanted to build was ppscsi, for a HP ScanJet 5100C. I wouldn't have had this problem under Debian. ^_^
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Last modified 2007年 3月 1日 @ 6:54 pm
2007年 1月 12日
Posted in LCA07, Micro Forté, Programming at 6:42 pm by TBBle (Visited 170 times)
In good news, the pledge drive to raise $10 000 towards a reverse-engineered NVidia DRI-3D-accelerated driver has succeeded. Dave Nielsen, the instigator of the pledge, gave a canned history of the pledge drive on his blog, and handily demonstrated that the free software community are willing to put a little bit of extra cash towards a little bit of extra freedom.
In bad news, the Ryzom.org bid to purchase "The Saga Of Ryzom" from failed developer Nevrax has failed. They were outbid by Gameforge AG. A ray of sunshine is that the project looks like it will continue, and there has already been the suggestion that they instead consider Asheron's Call 2 which closed in 2005 but was apparently quite good.
Co-incidentally, I was in one of the beta tests for Asheron's Call (I don't remember if it was 1 or 2), and today beta-testing applications opened for Tabula Rasa. I don't remember signing up for the mailing list, but I do have a PlayNC account through having purchased Guild Wars, a model I still hold up as being an excellent way to structure a MMOG's income, at least from a payer point of view. Of course, my job here at Micro Forté is as a programmer, not game producer, so my views aren't exactly changing the world... but give it time. ^_^
Speaking of Micro Forté, the Gaming Miniconf at LCA2007 is having Paul Murphy from (MF's MMOG technology development subsidiary, based in Sydney) as a guest speaker. I'll prolly have to sneak out of the Debian Miniconf to see that.
Poop. Paul Murphy's talk clashes directly with Anthony Town's "State of The Project" address. So there you go, first session of LCA2007 (barring keynotes, which don't conflict...) and I've got a scheduling conflict. >_< Maybe this year the recording will all work...
Edit: Someone floated the open-source Asheron's Call 2 idea the day it closed...
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Last modified 2007年 1月 12日 @ 7:00 pm
Posted in CBIT Internet, Clubs, Computers, Debian, LCA07, Micro Forté, Programming at 6:04 pm by TBBle (Visited 170 times)
Well, it's nearly LCA time again. This is just a quick post mainly to see if my syndication at Planet Linux.conf.au 2007 is working yet.
I've been working at MF (Milestones just seem to come at you faster than the calender would otherwise suggest) and particularly in the last couple of weeks getting a good vector-math workout.
I've also been working at picking off RC bugs to try and help Etch along a bit, since kind of hoped to be upgrading to it in the half of January that's just passed.
I've also been looking for a CMS for the ANU Anime Society to try and resolve the fact that our web admins never seem to last as long as we'd like. At the moment, Joomla! is top of my list for trialling, as I'm familiar with PHP and looks to have the relevant modules (forum, calendar, eventing system that'll need modification to work for screening scheduling). However, I'm open to other suggestions, and will see if anyone at LCA has any useful suggestions.
And of course, by adding Planet LCA 2007, I've had to read it. And I came across ThreatNet, which is a distributed compromised computer identification system. It's actually really simple, you do something to identify a certain IP as a threat (the sample code scans postfix logs for "REJECT: noqueue" which usually comes from "no such user" although I noticed it also comes from greylister at CBIT) and sends that IP address to a nominated IRC channel. I dunno what's next, actually. Presumably, sites can block that IP address as they see fit, and if the responsible parties for the machine become aware of it, they can take action. I'll be adding this to my ever-growing list of things I need to consider implementation of at CBIT.
On the plus side, I recently installed Debian on a Slug with a 512MB USB flash stick, and I'm going to see how Nagios performs on it. If it's up to scratch, I'll prolly shoehorn in a wireless card and see if I can monitor two disparate networks effectively.
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Last modified 2007年 1月 12日 @ 6:04 pm
2006年 10月 17日
Posted in Anime, Bandwidth Unlimited Pty Ltd, Clubs, Debian, Japan, Japanese, Linux, Micro Forté, Programming at 12:25 am by TBBle (Visited 1690 times)
Just a quick note, in the aftermath of the vote to decide where Anthony Towns, Debian Project Leader did something good for Debian, bad for Debian or indifferent to Debian with the Dunc-Tank.
I, Paul Hampson, hereby confess that I too earnt money for doing Debian work, specifically packaging FreeRADIUS and getting it sponsored into the archive in time for Sarge to ship.
Mind you, I didn't earn much money, since Bandwidth Unlimited (for it was they) went bust without paying me much, but they did pay me. And you might argue that I'd been looking for a package to help out with in Debian for nearly three years at that point, and I would have worked on it for free, and that when I was being paid serious money to administer an ISP, I didn't do much FreeRADIUS work at all.
To which I'd say that I'd never have picked FreeRADIUS were I not running an ISP, and I would not have been running an ISP had I not planned to become rich and buy the world's largest chocolate bar from the experience. And I didn't get a lot of my job functions done when I was running an ISP, so lower-priority things (like FreeRADIUS, cleaning my desk, a full night's sleep) were often pushed aside.
I have to say that until I recently became a professional, regularly paid, programmer, I was highly envious of people who get paid to work on Open Source stuff, let alone Debian stuff. Now I'm just envious, although that'll prolly upgrade back to highly envious after linux.conf.au 2007 (or as I like to think of it now, clitoris.conf.au)
This whole thing puts me in mind of my experience at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. I was one of the IT volunteers, and we basically picked up the less-interesting jobs the IBM-paid staffers gave us. At the time I felt a bit put out that I was there volunteering, and these guys were being paid to be there doing nothing that I couldn't have handled. Obviously that was decidedly unfair, and from my days of "I'm as good as or better than anyone else at computers" phase. But the unfairness of my attitude isn't actually the issue, the issue was that I really wanted to be paid to do that sort of thing, and didn't see why others should get paid but me not be.
Now of course I want two things: To get paid, and to do the things I love. I've finally reached the point where I can combine them, and I no longer begrudge those who, through luck, skill or otherwise, get paid more to do the same things, or get access to cooler toys to do them on. I'm envious, obviously. How do you not envy someone who gets to bring up Linux on a 128-way Power5 machine on the quiet? But that doesn't make me unhappy, it just makes me want to strive more, and work harder. One day I'll be the one submitting a paper to Linux.conf.au on some stupendously cool thing I've done. ^_^
Anyway, my short-medium term goal is to leverage the experience of the current MicroForté work, plus finishing my Japanese studies, to go work for a games company in Japan, combining my two favorite pipe-dreams into one, and making it reachable in a little as two years. Maybe I'll be lucky and MicroForté will open a Japanese office or something, or I'll luck out and end up working on a Japanese MMORPG with a Linux client and a measurable dose of serious cool. Or somehow end up programming at Nintendo.... Oh, sparkley eyes! *_*
And a by-the-by, it's two and a half months in, and I'm still totally thrilled to be working at a video games company. I mean, seriously, I'm like all, wow. I thought it was cool when I was working at TransACT, and my testing procedure involved firing up a video stream, and watching it on a TV. I had a TV on my desk, for work purposes, and that was the high-point of my career. Now I don't have a TV on my desk, but when I'm hacking on combat-handling code, part of my procedure involves firing up a game server, and playing.
I'm learning to take my time with things a bit more. I'm now much less worried that I won't speak six asian languages, play the piano, have my name someone in the Linux kernel that doesn't share a sentence with "blame", have invented an entirely new way of interacting with computers, master four different styles of martial art, earn my first dan in three different Japanese weapon styles, hold two masters degrees in disparate subject areas, earn infamy in the Debian community or even the admiration of my peers by 30. Or 40. I'll be pushing it to get there by 50. But the advantage of youth is that you get it when you're young, and only lose it if you let it go.
I guess on reflection, my goal has become to be a polymath ronin... For those familiar with anime, I think I want to be Kintaro Oe when I grow up...
Side-note: I'm now the secretary of the ANU Anime Society. Two days before the AGM, I wrote in an email to the then-executive committee that secretary was the one position I'd never take. Time makes fools of us all. ^_^ Congratulations to Cathy Ring on stepping up to the presidency, and to the other executives, old and new, for stepping up to what I expect (knowing Cathy) to be a hard-driven and successful year coming.
Oh, and someone asked this week about getting the GTO Live Action box set. So here's my AmazonJP links...
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Last modified 2006年 10月 17日 @ 12:25 am
2006年 8月 14日
Posted in CBIT Internet, Japan, Linux, Micro Forté, Programming, University at 2:16 am by TBBle (Visited 717 times)
Wow. "Later this week" certainly took longer than I expected.
As of July 31st, I'm a (junior, for now) programmer at Micro Forté's Canberra studio. Two weeks in, and it's the best job I've had so far. ^_^ My first task involved trying out installation of the BigWorld MMOG server system as a new user so we could see what state the documentation was in, and for those who know how pedantic I am, a four-page file called whinge.txt is actually a positive sign.
It's an approximately eighteen-month contract, so I guess Japan and University will have to be put off at least that much longer. Still, I've pretty much wanted to write video games since I was six, learning Applesoft BASIC on the family //c, so no regrets. ^_^
I'm no longer working full-time at CBIT Internet, although I am still maintaining the ISP's servers there.
In celebration, I bought Guitar Hero, which neccesitated getting my Playstation 2 back from Richard, who'd in the meantime bought a PS2 EyeToy. I haven't tried the bundled game yet, but instructions exist to use the EyeToy as a windows webcam, and to use the EyeToy as a linux webcam.
This, plus the request of a nice young lady whom I only seem to face-to-face once every twelve months or so that I install Skype, got me playing with Skype again. Sadly, the 10 euros of credit I bought in 2004 and was unable to use (due to their system failing to transmit voice to the US at the time) have "expired", which annoyed me enough that I was boycotting them. The boycott ended the moment someone asked me to actually use it, mind you. ^_^
Of course, this led me into an exploration of open-source alternatives. On the Skype-protcol side, there's a paper from 2004 looking at how Skype 0.97 talked to the network as well as a recent claims from a Chinese company to have reverse-engineered the Skype protocol. Sadly, the latter is planning to commercialise their results, not publish them.
On the actual open-source side, I've been playing with SIP stuff again. I've had a SIP-based Asterisk server running here (You can try to call me via SIP although I don't always have a SIP client running) for a while now, and I recently got a chance to test it with some overseas friends, but due to poor codec choice, it quality sucked.
On codecs, I have to say that Speex is great and iLBC is awful. Both in voice quality, and for the fact that Speex is free open-source, while iLBC comes with a "no-commercial use" license.
Anyway, with a webcam, I've been toying with video-supporting SIP clients. For windows, the only free one appears to be X-Lite 3 which doesn't do Speex (although its commerical version, eyeBeam 1.5 does) but for my purposes (LAN to the Asterisk Box) I can do G.711 and let Asterisk do the Speex transcoding for me.
Under linux, Linphone has video support (although the 1.35 Debian package is compiled without, and the build-deps to build it wanted to remove texlive in favour of tetex...) which I've not tried yet, but which a brief glance at the source suggests supports H.263-1998. Ekiga, the successor to GnomeMeeting, also supports video, via opal, but only H.261. There's H.263 code there, but relies on FFMpeg 0.4.7 patched to support RFC2190 for its video support. (It's actually FFMpeg's libavcodec that's being used, but very few people make the distinction it seems)
A brief aside on the video codecs at play here. H.261 is the older ITU-T video standard for ISDN, while H.263 was a newer standard which drew from H.261 as well as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, and which was the default video standard for H.323 computer video conferencing, thanks to things like Microsoft's NetMeeting and the open-source GnomeMeeting. However, along with MPEG technology comes murky and ill-defined MPEGLA patent issues. There's also H.263-1998, aka H.263p or H.263+, which adds some annexes to H.263 to support some more encoding features. For moving H.263 over RTP RFC 2190 was written. However, the stream format defined in RFC2190 couldn't support the data stream from H.263-1998, so RFC 2429 was published. Both H.263 and H.263-1998 can be carried in the RFC 2429 stream format, so in theory everyone should be using RFC 2429 streams, and we'd all be happy. Apparently, NetMeeting only support RFC 2190 and H.263 however, so that's the version that they implemented in Ekiga too (since Opal is a refactoring of the OpenH323 library's media interface, and Gnomemeeting's built on OpenH323. And the OpenH323 H.263 code was submitted by the same person who did the FFMpeg patch mentioned above.) Meanwhile, X-Lite supports H.263, H.263plus, and (according to my SIP debug logs on Asterisk) RFC 2429 streaming.
I spent most of today weighing up forwardporting the RFC2190 patch to FFMpeg, or updating libopal to support RFC2429. I didn't achieve much, but I weighed it up a lot. The final answer was wait for the current libopal refactoring (they've moved the video codec support out into plugins, and rewrote the H.263 code such that it's much easier to _add_ RFC2429 support) to reach my via Debian in some way, and then have a poke at it, if they haven't done it already. If it's not already done, I'm sure that submitted the code to make it work would make me an Open-source Telephony Hero
So to bring us back to the story, I've got a nice little Windows-based SIP client which does video but not Speex and needs to register with someone, a Linux-based client that does speex but which I haven't compiled the video for yet (Linphone), and a both linux- and win32-based client which claims to do Speex but barfs (Ekiga...) and which can't do the current video codec with the current video stream format, and depends on a slight fork of another library to do current video with the old format.
I can see why Skype's so popular...>_<
Incidentally, if you want a non-registrar-requiring Speex-supporting free but-without-video SIP client for Windows, I found PhonerLite seemed to work well. And frankly, if you're going to call me without warning at home, you might not want the webcam to show you whatever my current state of dress or undress is. ^_^
Talking to Chris Smart (of Kororaa) at CLUG's PSIG meeting last Thursday about webcams, Ekiga and kopete inevitably led onto the GPL and the Linux Kernel (he loves to talk about it, really! ^_^) and Chris pointed me at Greg K-H's take on Linux and Binary-only modules, which manages to draw the line between legal and illegal way way back there compared to where we all through we were. (On a sidenote, OLS looks like it would have been tremendous fun. I can hardly wait until I'm a jetsetting conference-attending Linux Kernel Hero.)
I've also been poking at the DeviceScape 802.11 stack for Linux. As well as happily running my laptop's Apple Airport Extreme2 card for the past few months, its software-based Access Point support appears to have progressed to the point at which I can start poking at it for Nintendo DS Wirelss Multi-boot infrastructure, which will bypass all the card-specific hacking people're having to do, as well as let it work on things that aren't RT25xx cards. It seems in the six months or so since I've looked hard at Nifi, a dude called masscat has picked up the ball and run with it, so I've almost 10 pages of forum thread, and then whatever code he's published, to catch up on. I'm pleasantly surprised, I thought with the advent of Wifi support for Nintendo DS Homebrew code interest in WMBing over Nifi would die. So here's my chance to get the dscape port done, and become an NDS Homebrew Hero.
I'm currently reading Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials and it's reinvigorating my love of Perl. ^_^ Shame MicroForté is a C++ and Python shop... Still, it's a nice change from reading The C++ Programming Language, 3rd Edition which I was reading for the six weeks between my first job interview and pretty much the weekend before I started at MicroForté. Of course, this means I'm tempted to spend my free time ignoring all the above ideas, and tooling about with Perl 6 and Parrot Especially with sheer coolness like Z-Code support in Parrot.
And for one final note, the real-estate agent is coming around next Saturday to inspect my flat, so I had to clean up. Luckily, it was mainly a case of emptying all the bins, although I need to run a quick vacuum around the place, it's a bit dusty in parts. I expect this inspection is because my lease expires in the next couple of weeks, and they want to know if they should kick me out or not. Given that I'm not working days in Watson with occasional evenings in Belconnen, I'm looking at moving anyway. Anyone know of a cheap one-bedroomer or two-bedroomer in Watson or adjoining suburbs? I'd like to be able to walk or bicycle to work. ^_^
Edit: Correct misspelling
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Last modified 2006年 8月 19日 @ 9:42 am
