Category Archives: minipost - Page 2

How MakingView works

Posted by on 2013/02/01 No comments

Found out about this (via a local news site) earlier, a product called MakingView. Their tagline:

Explore our unique and Award Winning 360° technologies, and the opportunities we offer in visual excellence.

Their pitch is that you can get the “real” experience. Pretty cool idea, so I thought I’d quickly take a look at how it works. First up, fire up a browser, grab the URLs.

Video: http://360content.redbull.com/2012/lofoten/medium.f4v
Player: http://360content.redbull.com/2012/lofoten/makingviewer.swf

Fire up VLC, and see the following (edit: apologies, it seems something somewhere is a bit screwed with the width of the content blocks, just open the pics in a new tab):

In the boat

In the boat

 

Boardwalk

Boardwalk

 

Next step: become disappointed that there isn’t really anything cool going on. Video is just a very long series of (admittedly probably well-tweaked) panoramic pictures, and the player maps that to a globe and points shows you wherever you’re watching. Sadpant.

Edit: to anyone wondering why I wrote this, I was really hoping there were some cool multi-stream video hax going on, but ended up not. And yup, first time I saw a thing like this.

ThoughtStreams

Posted by on 2013/01/29 No comments

In various ways, I’ll likely stop using the minipost tag/category, and rather feed all of that over here now: https://thoughtstreams.io/froztbyte

In general it seems like a platform better suited to that sort of thing. Time will tell.

Rage About Dinosaurs

Posted by on 2012/12/14 No comments

This text snippet from a colleague, although I’m fairly sure I’ll get my copy of the announcement soon as well:

“Up until now, Last.fm radio has been a subscription only feature in your country. However, unfortunately, from Tuesday 15 January 2013 we are no longer able to provide radio streaming to you due to licensing restrictions, and you will no longer be able to listen to Last.fm radio.”

I honestly wish all these dinosaur media companies and committees and agencies and whatever would just die already. Earlier today I was speaking to a friend of mine, one who also happens to be an artist. She’s currently raising money for her new album, and is just running it entirely by herself. Not that any of this is new to anyone sensible, of course. All of this licensing crap is just ridiculously frustrating, and at a guess I’m fairly sure it doesn’t actually end up helping all that many artists.

Ah well….hopefully time brings some useful change. At least the antiquated ITU seems to have been sent a decent message about how things should work.

Zenoss Device Listing

Posted by on 2012/10/16 No comments

Nice for if you need some form of automated report in zenoss, here’s a code snippet to print out a list of devices per class, formatted in markdown markup

typehash = {}
for d in dmd.Devices.getSubDevices():
    if typehash.has_key(d.getDeviceClassPath()) == False:
        typehash[d.getDeviceClassPath()] = []
    typehash[d.getDeviceClassPath()].append(d.viewName())

for key in typehash:
    print """### %s\n""" % (key)
    for item in typehash[key]:
        print "*   %s\n" % (item)
    print ""

Run it in the zenoss console, or anything with a dmd connection. Tested on 2.5.x, but should be trivial to port forward if it breaks.

(PS: I could probably fix up that last bit to do something with .iteritems() instead…)

Post-jump, things everywhere die

Posted by on 2012/10/14 No comments

Always a bit interesting to check out stats for things on the internet after a major event like Felix Baumgartner’s jump from space today. Here’s a graph for JINX, one of the two .za INXs.

Interestingly, it seems to have all come from only one of the two GGCs that are visible via that path.

Elsewhere we see similar drops, and also some of the GGCs dying (502’s were served up for a while). Here’s the CAR-IX stats:

During the stream, some people were handed off to Akamai edge nodes. I don’t have that much information on what was happening in all the various networks, though. Will be interesting to see that coming to light soon from the likes of Renesys and such.

Update: I see the first image from this page made it onto one of the .za news syndicators without credit. Nice of them.

Old tricks, new coins; same problems

Posted by on 2012/10/02 No comments

In setting up some mirrors recently, I’ve come to learn that rsync’s algorithm by default doesn’t deal well with long-haul TCP going hand in hand with small files. I still need to set aside some time to find a nice set of optimization flags to tweak that up a bit more. And when I say “doesn’t deal well”, I mean in the region of “can tx about 1/3rd a single-session TCP speedtest can do over the same path”. Later’s worry, though.

So, the point of this point:

receiver$ nc -l 1234 | pv | tar xf
sender$ tar cf - moz | pv | nc receiver.domain.tld 1234

And there you have a minimal-CPU-usage streaming file delivery setup. Of course, this doesn’t deal with retransmits or anything else. This just gets the bulk over. After that you can run an rsync with big block lengths over all of it, and get any files fixed using that.

And the “old trick” part of this? As far as I know, this is pretty much how the whole tape drive thing used to work[0]. I’ve just added some internet in the middle.

[0] – I wouldn’t know for certain, before my time

Elegua

Posted by on 2012/09/26 No comments

Public Service Announcement

Anyone who makes use of elegua, the transition of services on it is now complete and I’ve updated the main A and AAAA records to point at the new host.

If you have any issues, you know where to find me.

(That said, the original TTLs were like six gazillion years or something, so caches might flush later as they go. Query the upstream NS for the new record if you need it.)

Fun things to come home to

Posted by on 2012/09/10 No comments

*sigh*….so much for the idea of doing work on Coursera thing (I just signed up for today) tonight:

yariman# tail -n 100 syslog | grep ppp
Sep 10 16:44:41 yariman pppd[24971]: Plugin rp-pppoe.so loaded.
Sep 10 16:44:41 yariman pppd[24972]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0
Sep 10 16:45:16 yariman pppd[24972]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Sep 10 16:45:16 yariman pppd[24972]: Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery
Sep 10 16:46:21 yariman pppd[24972]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Sep 10 16:46:21 yariman pppd[24972]: Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery
Sep 10 16:47:26 yariman pppd[24972]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Sep 10 16:47:26 yariman pppd[24972]: Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery
Sep 10 16:48:31 yariman pppd[24972]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Sep 10 16:48:31 yariman pppd[24972]: Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery
Sep 10 16:49:36 yariman pppd[24972]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Sep 10 16:49:36 yariman pppd[24972]: Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery
Sep 10 16:50:41 yariman pppd[24972]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Sep 10 16:50:41 yariman pppd[24972]: Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery
Sep 10 16:51:46 yariman pppd[24972]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Sep 10 16:51:46 yariman pppd[24972]: Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery
Sep 10 16:52:51 yariman pppd[24972]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
Sep 10 16:52:51 yariman pppd[24972]: Unable to complete PPPoE Discovery
Sep 10 16:53:00 yariman pppd[24972]: Terminating on signal 15
Sep 10 16:53:00 yariman pppd[24972]: Exit.

Line sync’d where it always has, good signal vs noise, etc. DSLAM or something in the middle just missing. Now to wait and hope my ticket gets to a useful support person. It *sucks* not having access to the local loop.

And Justin Case™ you couldn’t guess it, that post title is a lie.

Everything is not “just a string”

Posted by on 2012/08/23 No comments

During a quick conversation on unicode and punycode, I managed to find http://☁→❄→☃→☀→☺→☂→☹→✝.ws

Cute, and a sad reminder of how many people still fight this.

Should I buy some stock?

Posted by on 2012/08/07 No comments

thoughts: I still have some stock account balance left..wonder if I should buy some..

In [1]: from random import choice
In [2]: choices = {'buy': 0, 'wait': 0}
In [3]: for i in range(0,5000):
    choices[choice(['buy','wait'])] += 1
   ...:
In [4]: choices
Out[4]: {'buy': 2518, 'wait': 2482}

Guess I’ll buy some stocks.

[ed's note: this method works equally well to decide which stocks you want to buy when you're lazy]