Finally, Subversion’s PROPFIND is enabled on the proxy server at one place I work, but for some reason Subclipse was still being a little bit special.
Turns out it doesn’t use Eclipse’s HTTP Proxy settings, but needs setting elsewhere.
On Windows XP, this will be in your Application Data path under Subversion. Mine is as follows:
C:\Documents and Settings\joshs\Application Data\Subversion
I haven’t got a Vista machine to test on, but it will still be the Application Data\Subversion folder within the user’s path. (I will confirm this next time I’m on a Vista box.)
Linux users, look in ~/.subversion/
Open the file “servers” (no extension) and scroll to the bottom section, [Global].
Un-comment and edit the http-proxy-host and http-proxy-port settings (and user/password if required, it wasn’t for me) as appropriate and everything will start working. You don’t even need to reload Eclipse.
Productivity just soared!
Gephex is brilliant. Probably a great way to build a really capable vision mixer (with some good real-time capture hardware) on a shoestring budget. I’m sick of dropping $120 and trekking over to Artarmon every time a few sources need to be strung together! Actually, if it weren’t for the fact that hire was locked in for an imminent evening, I’d probably have cancelled and spent my $120 on another capture card, instead. It’s nearly 10 frames behind realtime but that’s on a regular Windows box running as an un-prioritised process… on a dedicated *nix machine I reckon that would drop back to about 4 frames, which is totally a fair deal (you normally lose ~2 to genlocking/keyers anyway, and more if there’s a chain of mixers involved). Oh, yeah, and it does myriad effects and keying, too. Need to figure out how to link network streams in, but its pretty much perfect already. This is totally taking precedence as my spare-time hardware project — it’s just calling for some proper gear to be built. Time to buy that book on microcontrollers methinks.
There are other hardware projects I’ve got cooking, yes, but none so immediately useful or easily implemented. The great thing about this is the hard work (read:software) is essentially done already. At worst I’d need to hack some kind of interface driver, but, really, it’s pretty much functional as is. And, because it’s already been ported to Linux and BSD, it’s really trivial to build a barebones system upon which to base it all. Preserving keyboard + mouse input is a totally necessary design parameter anyway (for reasons of network stream integration, titling(!!), etc.) so hardware can be periodically switched on as it becomes available. I’m tempted to pull apart my languishing Athlon XP, but it feels too powerful for the task (not even kidding… this thing is lightning fast) and I wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of the RAM in it. My biggest concern is tracking down capture hardware that’s Linux or BSD friendly. Ideally there’ll be a security capture card that does PAL at full frame rate and has 4 inputs, because essentially that means it’d be trivial to add a few extra cards and, all of a sudden, it’s quite foreseeable to have a 12 input vision mixer that will key and title away til the cows come home.
One concern I have is that the mixer component only takes two sources… which is much the same as on any hardware mixers I’ve used (two buses: select source on A + B bus, mix buses), but it feels really inflexible. I’d chain them together but think that might necessitate extra genlocking time and increase overall latency. I can’t actually think of a usage scenario for this one, though, so it’s not a big deal. Because keying exists independently of mixing it’s not a concern of 2 sources + keyed source, and that’d be the main situation in which such a thing would be at all necessary.
The other cool thing about this is you can mix digital and analogue sources with impunity. Need SDI? Sure, get an SDI capture card and add an input source. Firewire? Done deal. Same goes for output: because you can output via FFMPEG, your “vision mixer” potentially also encodes an IP-distributable stream simultaneously with realtime output to a monitor.
This is an inestimably cool piece of software, but the most brilliant thing is it isn’t really anything new. I discovered it because I was looking for EffecTV which I’d last used in a production context over 12 months ago… Gephex uses existing open-source filters and processing solutions and just provides an excellent means of chaining them together. You can create some excellent motion artwork with it, but the most exciting thing for me is that it enables use of cheap and disposable x86 hardware in place of hideously expensive and proprietary (read: more expensive, but also inextensible and not particularly flexible) solutions that the ‘pros’ use.
Increasingly I’m disinterested in ‘professionalism’ about this sort of thing, because that’s way out of my price league and, to be honest, the most common place I wish this technology were applied is in church and Christian event contexts, where (even if there is money) no-one is interested in effective communication through applied technology. So we continue to try and push forward with no money and a bunch of innovative and irreverent (to the pros) solutions.
Ultimately, it’s about achieving excellence in the quality and nature of the work done to share the gospel and build up the body of those who follow Jesus — but excellence can be attained without even a smattering of ‘professionalism’.
That said, I’d still love to own an MX-70.
Geeking tonight was awesome. Never seen so many nerds in the one place. Need to get out (to nerd gatherings) more! Conductor was Arnie Roth, who was vaguely annoying but possibly only on account of his American-ness and the fact that someone gave him a microphone, and we all know giving conductors mics is invariably a BadIdea™. Akira Yamaoka had some crazy part to play with an electric guitar (they only used one mic on his amp, I was appalled!)… he was dressed quite interestingly. I suggested I adopt his fashion sense (because, invariably, mine is lacking!) and was promptly shut down by Claudia.
Video was annoyingly bad in the entire first half, because the vision switching was rubbish, the cameras were inappropriate for the task, and the camera ops had not the foggiest idea how to pull focus, adjust iris, or obey cues. Alternatively, the person calling the show was just really bad at letting people know when they were clear to start moving. I’d say somewhere between the two. Given there were only four live vision sources by my count (centre at audio desk, centre right (stage left), stage right, organ loft) it’s not exactly as though it should’ve been too complicated. The first two were house cameras and generally pretty okay. The third was an XL-1 or –2, whilst the camera at the organ was probably a XM or maybe a compact Panasonic camera. Both cameras 3 and 4 had serious aperture issues. The third was often too dark (failing to compensate for dim lighting in the room), whilst the fourth was waaay too far open. Apparently someone must have set it up when house lights were on and the organ was not: accordingly, it was absurdly bright against the other 3 cameras (zebra bars, anyone?).
Part of the issue also stemmed from having two different classes of projector in use in a configuration where the primary screen (called A) is ~18x9” and two secondaries (collectively, B) are perhaps half the primary screen’s dimensions (that is, a quarter of its size). All three were rear-project and I’d imagine that projector A was vastly more powerful than projectors B. Accordingly, camera 4 appeared on B without losing details, while on A the sheet music was a vast white expanse. This is why it’s important for video nerds to look outside their little control booth sometimes — preview monitors lie. Also, the larger screen was one of the dirtier fast-folds I’ve seen used, with clearly visible lines three-by-two across it becoming especially apparent in bright, high-motion segments.
Somehow video redeemed itself in the second half (maybe different cameramen, maybe the person calling shots got a clue in intermission, or maybe my hypercriticalness subsided somewhat), but I wasn’t left amazingly impressed.
Lighting, on the other hand… delightful. Eight 5kW fresnels with Colourset scrollers gave a nice wash to the stage above and beyond what the (more) intelligent fixtures could provide. I couldn’t pick the movers on the back bar, but I’d venture a guess at MAC600’s for the sides. Also four per side, as with the fresnels. Five along the back bar, though I’m quite sure they were a different kind of fixture. Lighting didn’t help out the cheap Canon video cameras, though the house cameras dealt with it admirably… there were a few really beautiful shots in there from those two.
Audio worked. The 6.1 (which I read about somewhere but now can’t find, and for which there were puncy little speakers about the size of SX100’s set up in their appropriate positions) was useful for drowning out the organ at one point and making percussion come from weird directions, but other than that I didn’t particularly notice it. Which is good. Either they weren’t using it, or the sound was just swallowed by the room. Quite a lot of mics and those sound partitiony things (they surely have a name, but I don’t know it), which would tend to indicate they were being quite ambitious about either recording the concert or mixing to surround and didn’t want audio leaking between microphones. Hence (in part) my frustration at the single mic on Yamaoka’s amp… redundancy is important where one instrument is that important, especially in a high-traffic area like that (conductor walks around more than anyone else on stage). There’s always the possibility to re-set mics in intermission, but if either Yamaoka or the conductor were to knock it on entering after the intermission? Stuffed. It was a decent sized amp, but it’d hardly carry throughout the building very well. Aside from that… well, I don’t really know what I’m talking about with audio, anyway. It sounded good.
I shocked myself by remembering large swathes of Zelda. This makes me think I must’ve had Butterfly-Effect-esque blackouts in my childhood, but oh well. I’ve also decided I want to buy a Dreamcast, difficult though that may prove, because I really wanted one when they first came out (on account of that whole Linux thing, Internet connectivity, the brand’s relative innocence — hey, maybe that’s why it’s gone now –, and a handful of delicious looking screenshots from games which got great reviews) and never got around to it before they stopped making them.
Konami are morons. Everyone else gives their game footage gratis, quite reasonably understanding that such coverage is only going to boost the value of their brand, yet Konami apparently insisted on a watermark on some footage provided. I’ve never been a fan of many of their games anyway, but that watermark pissed me off enough that I’m exceedingly glad they’re mostly stuck in arcades with aging picture tube consoles, anyway. About the same decade as their marketing saaviness.
As much as I will always whine about anything visual (I “enjoy” or “dislike” regular concerts without too much analysis, because I can’t), it was a good night. It made me miss productions enormously (live vision especially), which is funny because I think the desired effect was to make people miss video games instead. Claud had fun laughing at the geeks getting all dressed up. We both laughed as certain members of the audience were baffled by performance conventions! All in good fun.
What follows is written far less well than it deserves, but — ironically — I’m drowning in other work at present. This needed writing sooner than other things did.
Michael’s pulling the plug on the server that this website has run on since 2003.
The ‘server’ has changed dramatically in constitution since it all began way back when, but… wow. An astonishingly large part of my teenage years. For the longest time, it seemed as though the Internet had altogether ceased to exist everytime Dale’s connection went out. In the early days, we were all running servers on port 1200 to circumvent ISP restrictions on port 80. phpBB was the order of the day, running Apache — on a pirated copy of Windows 2000 (those were the days in which “legitmate software” constituted an oxymoron). Operating on an early ADSL link with 64kbps upload, forum emoticons were hosted on free web space provided by iiNet in order to conserve bandwidth. You laugh now, but the speed boost was incredible. Every time iiNet dropped out (to future readers: that’s what happens when the internet goes out for a couple of hours, none of this occasional connection time-out rubbish), an irate explanatory post from mwdmeyer would emerge and life would continue as normal. Until parents discovered the server running and turned it off again, which would spark an effort to conceal yet another computer in a room crowded full of equipment. About halfway through 2004, they gave up searching.
These were the days (for me) of NE2000 clones powering Smoothwall/m0n0wall routers, recycling hardware, a subscription to Atomic before all the other kids (I bought more geeky magazines than anyone I know – I think it was that strange meeting place of compters, creativity, and cant that I later became comfortable with), when GeForce 2’s and Pentium 4’s (the first ones with RDRAM that everyone despised) and DDR-supporting Athlons were still zippy. When frame-based redirects passed for domain names — .tk, anyone?
Mostly, it was about the forums… but as for personal publishing, this was no small resource. My first dynamic website was a blog hosted on that server — I don’t think it yet had a name — we all rolled our own web software in those days (it’s not that long ago). Some of us still do. The first domain name acquired was Dale’s, in March 2004, co-inciding (more or less) with the forums’ first birthday. Twelve US dollars later (Joker.com’s prices still haven’t changed), we were all still using frame-based redirects — static IPs were the stuff of pipe-dreams, and Dynamic DNS, though around, was outside of the experience of most of us. Steve ran a notoriously-flaky IIS server with real domains and Exchange, but paid about $150 a month for the privilege: static IPs being available only on business grade internet connections.
These are mere details. The forums themselves constitute an amazing chronicle of the lives of mwdmeyer, ucosty, Sammy, i_am_a_n00bie, Smile:), smKz, n|cktangents, angelicdeity, baibai, Sphinx^, ludvikas, and a handful of others over a fairly tumultuous time. There is so much not recorded explicitly that surrounds the nearly 16,000 messages from these eleven users alone. Some has been suppressed, other parts forgotten, but all of it inextricably linked together in the momentum of time. There are some things about that time which will never be shared with those who weren’t around.
The forums didn’t survive post-school. This shouldn’t be surprising, given the amount of research that says this will be the case for any given relationships faced with that manner of transition, but it was still bizarre witnessing what would have been several months of time spent on a single website evaporate into (not much). The server moved from Balmain to Marian Street, eventually finding its way into a rack there. This is where things get hazy for me. I think the last time I saw Michael might’ve been New Years’ Eve 2005/2006… I feel some sense of guilt about that, but recognise mutual busy-ness had a role such that neither of us should be blamed alone. I don’t believe that a blameless “but things changed” is ever sufficient when talking about close relationships. I’m fairly certain my closest friend for about two years at school is someone that I no longer have anything to do with, but can’t explain why. And I know that I can’t in any way blame him, because I’m so guilty of failing to keep working on relationships myself.
I suppose the point of all this is that the computer formally known as ‘Metro’, now ‘Loki’ (I don’t know how it got that name — Loki to me is an amazing contributor to Linux-based gaming, 2000 – 2002 RIP, but it could just as easily have been named after the Norse trickster and Odin’s wily accomplice!) isn’t just the latest in a series of bits of electronic gear that some markup and pixels have been piped off for a couple of years. This is just one step closer to a complete closure of a very large chapter of my life… and, yeah, that’s incredibly sad.
Please don’t for a minute consider this to be my arguing that Loki should stay switched on — it’s about something far greater and more personal than a startlingly reliable FreeBSD web server that just happened to host a website for free for a long time.
There aren’t too many people you can make sit in the back of a car on their 18th birthday, much less who will laugh along with as it happens.
This isn’t an obituary, just a poor expression of remorse at the (human) disconnection and ‘drifted’ relationships of that era. Michael, once all this stupid uni crap gets out of the way (maybe after you move again?), I owe you a fairly large drink.
Thankyou.
Whenever I need to find Firefox in task manager, it doesn’t ever take long. Firefox is the fat kid of web browsers… it’s kind of hard for it to hide. If it once were a sleek, lean fox, today it’s caught just a few too many stray chickens and drunk a little too much of Bean’s apple cider. It wouldn’t take any bulldozers to find this fox, just a moderate sized keyboard with three keys (no prizes for guessing the three-finger’d salute).
I haven’t had a great day with Firefox. Well… I spent 3 – 4 hours in meetings today, so I didn’t even have that much time with Firefox! Still managed to let me down twice, though.
Damn its indisposable development tools *sobs uncontrollably*
I think I’ll switch back to Opera for all non-development Internet-related activity for a while… unless anyone has any other browser recommendations? I’ve seriously thought about IE7, but its rendering is still just a little too patchy for me to be able to live with myself as an Internet user.
Bleh. Let it be observed: even high-profile open source does not always lead to a good product. Its memory management is nothing short of repulsive. It will regularly use more memory than Photoshop and Illustrator combined — admittedly, I use Photoshop mostly for web production and not high resolution print stuff (though that does happen a few times a week, and it won’t often go far beyond the 350MB that Firefox seems to manage fairly regularly)
I’m still using CS2, so there aren’t any magical CS3 memory management advances that make such a claim possible… Firefox just sucks :P
I’d blame Windows being in need of a reinstall (it’s been running since October… more than six months without death :P Plus I started out not being happy with it because it’d been installed from the guy I bought the computer off, I just hacked it to use my CD key instead of the one he’d used to test things… so it’s never been perfect), but really, it’s not that bad for any other application. I normally do a reboot once a week and things are fine… heavy duty graphics editing, occasional video editing, constant mail and occasional wordprocessing… and of all those things it is a web browser that can’t get it right. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so derisive about it seeing as I make a living off developing in this relatively simple world… but I am.
The flip side to all of that, of course, is that I’ve been trying to live (more) like a normal user the past few years. Essentially, recognising that it’s simpler to buy software than write it (WordPress, Flickr), using hackably-open technologies instead of truly open ones (WMA Lossless sans DRM), and a general abandonment of open source principles in favour of vastly improved productivity (Photoshop, Premiere, Office 2007, royalty-free stock).
It’s certainly paid off in terms of professional development and enhanced creative potential… but there’s something lost in not being able to hack visualisations hooked up to a webcam together on a command-line anymore. Admittedly, that sort of thing only comes around half a dozen times a year! But no matter, it’s all good fun. Given more friends who were into that sort of thing and some good music, I’d so live in the party house. I’ve not figured out how to do the same command-line video tricks using Windows just yet, so next time I’ll probably use Windows for visualisations (woo particle emitters!) and a separate Linux-powered laptop (maybe?) for webcam trickery. Then I’ll take webcam stuff straight out into Windows capture and skip my vis mixer altogether for once… I gotta learn to travel lighter anyway!
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