BurnPC.com

One of the great things about linux is that everything is modular. In the case of window managers, Compiz Fusion is really coming along to be pretty freaking awesome if you have the computer to handle it. This video pretty much sums up how awesome it is:

Unfortunately, it looks like YouTube has changed the way they process .mp4 videos. At least for the type of mp4 files created by my nokia phone (Nokia N95). The videos now appear more jerky (less frames per second / FPS?), and there is no longer a HQ option. My phone takes great videos and this has been a nice way to share them with family. I may have to look for an alternative service, or convert and host them myself. Google where are you? I hope this gets changed, as it is a move backwards for me. This seems to have happened at the time when they started promoting HD content (720p). Oh well… Here are 2 examples of my videos. I’m sure you can tell the difference. They were both taken with the same phone, same application and everything. I transferred the jerky one to my PC to verify and it looks nice and smooth there.

Video 1: Nice quality, even better if you select HQ

Video 2: Jerky, no HQ option

When my computer blew up, I built out an Ubuntu Hardy box for the meantime. I’m thinking this is what I’ll go with when I rebuild the computer when the warranteed parts come in. I just installed Picasa 3 beta and so far it seems every bit as feature-rich as the Windows version. If you want to install it and you’re using a debian-based system (apt-get) then I recommend that you install from google’s beta repository. It’s easy!

edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the repository listed here. You’ll then need to install google’s pgp sigining key. use wget to retrieve it. OK so I was lame with the no-check thing, but I’m not worried.

wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub --no-check-certificate

sudo apt-key add linux_signing_key.pub

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install picasa

Done!

picasa > /dev/null &

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion,
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.

Dune

This ain’t a post about BBQ. Unfortunately my computer suffered some serious injuries last night. I sat down at my desk and the monitor wouldn’t come out of sleep. Turned it off, on, nothing. So I look down and find the computer off. This is odd as I had been using it a few minutes earlier and didn’t shut it down. So I hit the power switch. Nothing. Hmm, maybe a loose power cord? There’s a lot of wires underneath my desk, it’s feasible that I would kick one loose. So I checked the power, unplugging and plugging in the cord. Flipped the switch on the power supply off, then on. Hit the power switch on the front. POP! Circuit breaker kicks, and I see smoke rising from the PC. Dang it! I just built this thing in the Fall. Good thing is everything is under warranty. It appears that the power supply went, and took the motherboard with it. It’s quite disappointing to me as I bought this high quality supply to avoid these kinds of issues. Oh well. I took it into a shop to let them figure out what got killed. I’ll build up a box to use in the meantime tonight while I do the warranty shuffle for a couple weeks.

For anyone who is curious, the PC was well built, ventilated, and had plenty of juice to spare. The 850 was driving a single Radeon 7850×2, AMD Phenom quad core, & 2 x WD Raptors.

I found it very difficult to track down what the URL format to supply to Eclipse to import using the “Check out Maven projects from SCM” option. An Accurev run blog covers the topic, but conveniently glosses over the URL portion, just explaining

Like other integrations with Maven, AccuRev supports a URL format for specifying where to obtain code. The URL lets you specify the AccuRev user and login credentials, as well as the exact depot and stream from which to import the code.

OK then, so how do I put together this URL?

Accurev made a press release, but didn’t provide any docs on this. The presentation on their site conveniently skips over this exact spot… I don’t think that is by accident. They show little pieces of the URL, but mention nothing about what components need to be supplied. It would expose this ‘integration’ to be no more than supplying command line arguments via a gui text box. http://www.accurev.com/virtualbooth/Maven/flash/AccuRev-Maven-Demo.html

Don’t bother trying to think of this as a URL either. When the plugin calls accurev.exe it just passes elements you supplied into the command line. Sure doesn’t seem like a URL to me!

At this point I recommend not bothering with this piece of integration. It’s much easier to create the Accurev workspace as you normally would. Then import it as a Maven project into Eclipse. Then right click on the project and select share. Done. And you know you put the Accurev workspace in the right location.

Your task, should you choose to accept it:

• Review Impulse Response: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_response
• Get an idea how measuring the impulse response of a speaker system can be used for understanding reflections and their impact on what you hear: http://www.duffroomcorrection.com/wiki/Impulse_Response
• This now leads naturally into Time-Frequency analysis, and some pretty graphs to stare at. http://drc-fir.sourceforge.net/doc/drc.html#htoc233 The graphs are shown in pairs - uncorrected / corrected. The impulse response is used to generate the corrected portion of the graph. The differences in amplitude across frequencies at time = 0 should be pretty obvious.

I actually have a set of these measurements in a 30 page PDF generated from measurements I took of my car stereo. OK I’m a nerd…

The computer in the trunk of my car finally gave out. This is the one I’ve been using for Digital Room Correction as well as active crossovers between tweets, mids, and sub. Something probably shook loose but at this point the proof-of-concept stage is over. So out with the roped to the side of the trunk mid-tower, and in with the mini-itx solution. I’m still researching mobos but am leaning towards something based around the Intel dual core atom processor. Definitely mini-itx form factor (170mm x 170mm). I’ll be documenting the project at http://www.burnpc.com/audio/mobile-digital-room-correction-drc-project/

I installed Vista this last summer and initially was OK using it as I was playing games quite a bit. The novelty has worn off, and I’m now finding myself bored and will move back to Linux. In the past I’ve used Red Hat, Fedora, and Gentoo. I’ve recently been messing around with Ubuntu for my MythTV boxes, (mythbuntu to be exact) and have been very impressed. I will probably go for a Kubuntu install as I prefer KDE over Gnome. What’s really exciting though is to get 4 x WD Raptors going in RAID 10. I have two in my current PC, and I ordered 2 more used on ebay. They are the old 36GB raptors, but still blazingly fast. Getting them going in RAID 10 may be a bit challenging, but then that’s the fun of it! Actually I plan on doing a small partition as RAID 10 for the important stuff, but will put all my installs etc onto a RAID 0.

On Friday I’ll be hanging out with Sloan and Albert who are making home-made sausages for the super bowl. It reminded me of this video: