Author: tsukasa

The fool's herald.

Wine 1.0 RC

Woot woot. Good things do happen 🙂

Now it’s time to do some regression tests. Without implying bad things here, but people should be very strict with applications before giving out platinum status.

Things like “does work perfectly fine as long as you don’t click button X” or “works perfectly fine but has some visual glitches” usually mean the application does not work perfectly fine and therefore doesn’t really deserve platinum status. Feels a bit like cheating on yourself if you give out platinum too easily. Just my two cents, though.

CoreAVC 1.7 + Mplayer

It took me about a week to sort out some issues with my setup but now CoreAVC 1.7 is running fine in my SVN version of Mplayer thanks to the revamped patches from the CoreAVC-for-Linux project (yay, no more old builds!).

Some notes:

  • If you’re using the correct-pts option in your ~/.mplayer/config you should set it to “no” to get a huge performance boost. I dearly hope this is a new thing… otherwise I’d have to redo all my benchmarks 😉 .

CoreAVC for Mplayer dead, reborn, punching bad boys to a pulp

It’s a real shame: A while ago I blogged about a very nice set of patches to make CoreAVC work on Mplayer. Now it seems that a DMCA note was filed and Google has kicked the project from it’s Code page.

Don’t fret, though! CoreCodec is a little torn apart on this issue but is apparently helping Alan, creator of this great patchset, to make the patches ready for CoreAVC 1.7 (the most recent one, you had to use 1.5.* before):

Regardless of the cause, CoreCodec and I have resolved the conflict, and CoreAVC-for-Linux should be back online soon.  In addition, the patches for 1.7.0 are ready to go, and Linux users should see a nice performance improvement on Dual-core machines (compared to 1.5.0) once it is available.

Geez people, don’t scare us like that!

Nemo

Can’t really tell how I’ve managed to overlook this great program 🙂 .

Nemo is a file manager without… well… it’s more like a calendar actually… but with files. Hard to explain but very fitting to keep track of my incredible heap of data. I’ll keep an eye on this project as it is not only written in C# (Mono) but also utilizes the capabilities of Xesam. That makes 2 great reasons to love it already 🙂 .

Ouch

It’s a good thing that people actually listen to you when asking for advice on what kind of TV they should buy. Too bad they stop listening when you start talking about upgrades to the rest of the television set stuff (like set top boxes, for instance).

So, there’s this shiny new Full HD television with 3 HDMI ports and all kinds of kinky fizzle and the picture still looks like crap. Can you guess why? Let me give you a small hint: It has something to do with the receiver just doing 1080i instead of 1080p. [Note: I’m talking about the picture on HD channels, of course!]

Just to prove that coughing up 2000 Euro for a new TV wasn’t a phenomenal waste of money (although on review, it was considering Germany’s TV shows) you just have to hook up some fairly powerful multimedia overlord computer to that thing and play .hack//G.U. Trilogy, it’ll get you a nice “Wow” moment 🙂 .

Of course you could also spend additional 600 bucks and get a PS3 and GTA IV to celebrate your unending stream of funds. That way you can also assure that I’ll always be Johnny on the spot to fix stuff at your place. Ah, but make sure you’ve got enough potato chips and soda 😉 .

New hardware just keeps rolling in

I’ve been in love with the SATA cradle from the moment I saw it. Too bad that darn thing costs half a fortune when importing it from Japan. Sharkoon obviously saw the potential of the device as well and made a similar device available in Europe — USB only.

QuickPort Pro

What a bummer. But finally the QuickPort Pro comes to the rescue and brings eSATA goodness to us poor, poor European pigs. Amazon Germany sells the QuickPort Pro for 36 Euro per unit. Quite a pricetag but worth the money if you work with many harddisks. Mine’s ariving tomorrow, together with a new pair of disks 🙂 .

Wuala

I’m a big fan of new technologies and interesting software. I’m also a fan of filesystems and the concepts behind filesharing programs.

So I’m really glad to be able to give Wuala a try. The program can best be described as a decentralized, p2p based filesystem with credit system built in that’ll integrate into your filesystem (on Linux via NFS) and allows you to store files encrypted on the net.

Yeah, sounds a little bit fishy. But it works flawlessly and quite fast to this point so I can’t really moan 🙂 . The idea is quite simple: For starters you get 1GB of space, if you are online on a regular basis (more than 17%) you can trade space on your harddisk for more online space.

What to make of Wuala? Time will tell, there are only a few users right now and the formula for online time calculation could need a little makeover. Apart from that: Cool!

K2 Hooks

One of the major annoyances with theme upgrades is that all your precious changes will be lost, or you’ll have to diff and patch it from one version to another. That’s quite a lot of useless work.

The K2 theme I’m using as the base for this WordPress installation supports two cool features now:

  • You can include your own stylesheets without changing one line of code.
  • You can access various hooks to modify the way K2 works without changing one line of code.

Personally I think that’s totally awesome. But there are some points I’m still missing, though. For starters, the hooks are currently quite rudimentary, I can’t really control every element at this point. Second, I want to add options to the admin panel through my style’s functions.php — which I am unable to do atm (if I’m wrong on this point, please enlighten me :)).

Nevertheless, K2 is absolutely awesome. Ah, and in case you wonder… yes, the theme is getting a makeover. I’m migrating from the old, broken (too much playing ;)) Unsleepable 2 to a new something I’m currently building.

It’s alive again~ !!

Geez, what a unlucky day! Had to format the laptop, reinstall Vista (two times, to be precise!) and I’m finally getting all my data back from the fileserver (over WiFi, that is… I guess I’ll get cancer because of that someday).

At least FLStudio and the KeyRig work again, so I have some toys to play with 🙂 .

As a note to everyone who encounters a bluescreen after installing Vista updates on the file crcdisk: Do not install the update KB *899! Yes, it is required for SP1, but if you have to install it, postpone the process to the very end of your update process. Or even better: Get a Vista SP1 DVD. I’ll try to do so for future reinstallations.

Mplayer + CoreAVC

Windows, despite all it’s flaws, is nice for a few things. First of all, there’s a buttload of cool, gory games. And second there’s a really nice multimedia support; many companies/individuals write highly optimized software for video splitting, decoding, muxing, output etc.

Now, three cool programs are Haali’s Media Splitter (comes with Haali’s Media Renderer), CoreCodec’s CoreAVC and nVidia’s PureVideo. Combining these leads to a boost in performance, allowing my 2GHz notebook to play 1080p content steadily without hard framedrops.

Linux on the other hand is a little cornered. Yes, we do have XvMC for hardware MPEG-2 decoding but this doesn’t really help with HD content at this point. So until there’s a counterpart to PureVideo Linux will always be slower.

As you may know I only recommend Mplayer and Xine on Linux. They’re the greatest, the best and if you think otherwise you must be stupid 😉 .

Mplayer can be patched to use CoreAVC for a little performance boost (we all need a little boost, do we?). This is great stuff. The patch will fail a chunk against loader/Makefile, but it’s no problem to add the missing lines by hand. Also, please note that you’ve to run ./configure –disable-mencoder before applying the patch.

So, how much does it give us in terms of raw performance? Not too much, unfortunately, but for my system 5-12% already make a big difference.

Most of the performance loss is still being caused by the lack of hardware MPEG-4 decoding and the use of the old Overlay mixer.

Nevertheless, if you have bought CoreAVC you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

Venturing into KDE4… and back.

Since anything I would write in long paragraphs would be nothing but a rant, I’ll keep it brief and half-way composed:

Blablabla, complaining about how much plasma agravates me right now (including theme, sound scheme is nice), blablabla, don’t care about all the other applications but fix the base desktop stuff, blablabla.

Blabla, not enough configuration options for the end user, blablabla, plasma settings for desktop don’t get saved on-the-fly but on logout, blablabla, zoom-out does happen without my written consent, blablabla, panel width dialog doesn’t allow typed vales > 1024, blablabla, Marble = great , blablabla, development speed has to be godlike to fix all this ’till 4.1. Blablabla, so for now I’m back on the proud 3.5.9.

It’s like KDE4 tries hard to look cool and stuff but when you ask it to dance it looks at you with big eyes and falls straight onto it’s pretty face. That’s the feeling I get.

Blablabla. Personally I think the devs are still the coolest kids on the block. Even if I can’t select multiple files on my “desktop”.

Did I forget anything… ah yes, blablabla.

Limit CPU consumption of applications on Linux

One of the more frequent questions in support channels: How do I limit a specific application to not consume all my cpu time?

While it is generally a bad idea to limit applications in that department, it is indeed quite easy…

Install the tool cpulimit (most modern distributions should have a package ready in their repositories!) and launch it with the correct parameters:

cpulimit -P /usr/bin/foobar -l 10

The command above would wait for program /usr/bin/foobar to be started and limit the CPU consumption of the application to a maximum of 10%.

Note that without further configuration you’ll need to sudo cpulimit or start it as a root. The specified application can be started in a normal user context, though.

Moving folders to the server side

Wow, the second Windows-related post today? Something horrible must be happening to me right now…

Anyway, you may know a situation like this: Many clients, one server and a terribly stubborn application that just wants to write into that one pesky folder on the local hard disk. Needless to say that thanks to your policies that won’t last a reboot.

So, how can we tame applications like that? People want their data to be available across the network, in a central location/database. If the application’s data is not transaction-dependant you’re in luck.

Unix-lovers know hard-, soft- and symlinks. Hardlinks are available on Windows XP as well, but the truly wonderful stuff comes in on Vista: You get the two other missing types.

That doesn’t mean that XP users are left in the cold, you can download the necessary tool from various sources on the net for free and give it a shot.

So, what is this mysterious tool? It comes with Vista and is called MKLINK. Just use it like this:

mklink /D "Damn local database folder" "\\SERVER\DatabaseFolder"

Yes, we can actually point to a UNC path and — given the client users have sufficient rights — will be able to browse the folder just like any other folder on your file system. That’s pretty sweet and incredibly useful for ol’ haggy applications.

Don’t forget that this operation (just like everything fun) requires elevated access to do!

Temporarily register fonts using a normal User account

As you may know Windows is quite stiff sometimes. You can’t add additional font directories like you’d do on Unix. Another stiffy problem is that Windows requires an elevated account for operations like installing/removing fonts from the system. That’s quite troublesome at times.

This is exactly when my little tool jumps in. With RegisterFont you can add a number of fonts to your font cache without using an elevated user account. The downside is that all the changes persist only ’till the next reboot; Windows will rebuild it’s cache and the changes will be lost.

Anyway, the archive contains a binary as well as the C# sourcecode to this small utility. Use it like that:

RegisterFont.exe add font1.ttf font2.ttf font3.ttf … font1000.ttf

Easy, huh? If you don’t want to add fonts but remove them, substitute the “add” parameter with “rem” and you’ll be set. I didn’t bother to link up to the MSDN entries explaining the API, this is just a quick and dirty tool I wrote because we were in need of a quick solution to a problem 🙂 .

Update 2010-08-27: dcpurton wrote a tool in C to accomplish the same goal but without the .net dependencies. Best of all: Sourcecode is also available 🙂 .