I was flipping through my GameCube games today and it looks like I have two copies of Super Smash Bros. Melee. I presume that the second copy belongs to someone from 004. Anybody want to claim it?


Published by XPost^GTK+

Over the past several weeks, I have been cropping, reencoding, and tagging the 73 recorded 004 Shows that were made. As of last night at about 5 am, I have completed this task. Currently, all 73 shows are available for direct download from the website. Unforunately, this presents something of a problem. Only counting the "final" versions of each show, the total filesize is about 6.7 GiB. Given my consumer grade internet, I realized that transfering such files to other people would be an incredibly time-comsuiming task.

This bandwidth issue led me to implement my webseeding client (I'll release the source to it somewhere eventually) and to create a set of torrent files for the show recordings. The main things of interest are:

Season 1-3 Batch Torrent - This is every show that was recorded while I was in college. Collectively, that is about 70 full or partial shows.

Homecoming 07 Torrent - The Homecoming 07 show.
Homecoming 08 Torrent - The Homecoming 08 show.
Homecoming 09 Torrent - The Homecoming 09 show.

So here's the deal: these files collectively represent a small proof of our existence at Rose and WMHD. For now, I'm seeding the torrents on both of my internet connections, but ensuring the surivival of the recordings is the responsibility of everyone who was a part of the show or who cared about it. As it stands, we're one wildfire or earthquake away from losing all of the recordings since they only exist on the machines of computers in my apartments. What I'd like is for everyone who was part of the show to at least grab a copy of the batch torrent. If you want to help seed, that would be nice as well.

In the future, I'd like to also make the files available for streaming by uploading them to whatever is the audio-only equivalent of youtube, but that is a large, long-term project with which I will probably require assistance.

So, there you have it: the 004 show finally available for all. It only took me two years to get around to making it available. I'd say that isn't too bad.


(P.S.: Cross-posted to the004show group so that it'll show up on the website).

Published by XPost^curses

Both of my parents text-message me. I have, in my life, sent perhaps two text-messages. Maybe this is due to them having smart phones, but I just don't get it.

Now, I do actually make use of text-messages in my daily work. I've configured one of our mission-critical systems at work to text-message me in case of problems (alarm limit violations, etc). I chose this path as I am significantly more likely to have my phone at any given time than to necessarily be checking my email. This also removes any need to create some sort of text-to-speech gateway with phone dialing capability to relay the same information or to rely on one of our human operators to spot the issue and call me.

Perhaps my opinion will change if I ever get a smartphone.

Published by XPost^curses

JPL doesn't get Columbus Day off, but I ended up not going into work today anyway. My sleep schedule has gotten so screwed up over the past few weeks that I am almost perfectly offset by 180 degrees. After going to bed last night at 3am and lying in bed until at least 5:30am, I finally managed to get to sleep. But the whole "getting up two hours later" thing didn't go so well, so I called in. I ended up sleeping until 4pm. It looks like I'm on track to get very little sleep again tonight, which will probably make tomorrow lots of fun since I have a non-skippable meeting tomorrow at 8am. Hopefully, I can at least make it through the day without falling asleep at my desk.

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In other news, I've cleaned up shows through 0063 now. I'm currently using git to version control them because I don't want to do something stupid and wipe out a huge pile of work. Unfortunately, this is causing me to run into fun corner cases in the git implementation. Apparently, it doesn't like committing several gigabytes at once. I went back and cleaned up the metadata for everything that I'd done so far--putting in correct show data, making sure show titles were in quotes, fixing the genre tag--and then attempted to commit them all at once. This caused a malloc failure in git, but it apparently will take smaller chunks and allow me to commit them a bit at a time. It is also ridiculously slow during the pre-commit phase. I suspect both of these issues stem from it trying to create a giant diff for the files.

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I mentioned earlier that I was playing through Kingdom Hearts 2 again. Earlier today, I got to the Lion King portion of the game. I saw Lion King several times as a kid, but only today did something finally make sense to me. Once Rafiki becomes aware of Simba's continued existence, he uses his fruit to draw an outline around the face of his Simba drawing on the wall. I had alway thought that he did this to sort-of "cancel out" his previous wiping off of it. This time, however, I finally realized that he was drawing the adult Simba's mane. This only took me 1.5 decades to realize. Wow.

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Lets talk for a moment about bittorrent. It is a highly useful method of relaying data from a user with little bandwidth to a swarm of other users. Bittorrent has had a nifty little extension added a while back called "webseeding". This allowed you to, in addition to the standard bittorrent connections, have one or more "fallback" locations wherein users could pull via http. This is a great idea for people who want to set up a handful of legal torrent, but don't want to necessarily have to make sure that they continuously are running their bittorrent client.

I happen to be in this category of people. I looked around for a while to try to find a free, open source implementation of a webseeding client, but was unable to find one that wasn't deeply tied into another system (such as Drupal). Failing there, and being a programmer by education and trade, I decided to write my own. It turns out that both the specification (insomuch as there is one) for the .torrent file format and the specification for the webseeding extension are very simple. I coded up a very simple client over the course of the last few days and got it working successfully an hour or so ago.

During this, I found several incredibly annoying things. Firstly, it appears that ktorrent (my favorite bt client), despite listing webseeds as supported, doesn't support them correctly. They fail to load when embedded in the torrent itself, and when manually added, behave badly. By behave badly, I mean that they connect to the address and specify no arguemnts (like an info_hash or desired block number). Ktorrent then complains when it can't download any data a few times before giving up and accusing the server of being bad. I ended up doing my testing with bittornado, it helped me realize that I had misread the specification. I had thought that info_hashes were to be provided as 40-bit hex strings rather than as 20-bit raw strings. Once I realized what was going on, I wrote some wrapper code to do the 20 to 40 bit conversion (I didn't want to use the 20 bit version because of my caching scheme). This was about 8 lines of PHP code. I ran it again and it still seemed to be unable to locate the file. After adding some debug output, I found that the conversion was producing a string which, rather than being the conversion of the 20 bytes was the string '00' prepended to the first 19 bytes of the 20 byte version. This I found absolutely bizarre. Digging deeper, I discovered that PHP's unpack function is deeply broken. Rather than acting like perl's unpack and producing an array as its return value, it instead produces a hash (insofar as all PHP arrays are hashes). It does this by having you include with each specifier a slash and a name for the previous specifier. Here is where the trick comes: if, like me, you include no specifier, it places those elements into the returned array/hash with numeric keys incrementing for each unnamed specifier and starting at 1. Not zero. Arrays in PHP start at zero. Everywhere. Always. Unless, apparently, if you are using unpack.

WTF?

(Also, apparently tumblr is down and that fact will cause xpost to crash when it attempts to authenticate a tumblr blog. I should fix this. Guy: remember to fix this)

Published by XPost^curses

I'm currently encoding the 004 show episode 0052 (House of Cards). While I was cutting it up, I began listening and ended up listening to about half an hour of the show. In the course of it, I listend to myself describe the process that I'm currently doing now--cutting up the shows for the website. At the time, I was doing this work on my laptop or my Windows desktop. At that time, I was so constrained on disk space that I could only be working on one show at a time. Also, the disks and/or CPUs were so slow that it took over an hour to load the files into Audacity for editing and then to export them again as oggs took an equivalent amount of time. Now, I can go much faster. I did a batch conversion of all the shows left to be upload about a week ago. To do ~30 shows took less than 1 nights sleep + 1 work day. Doing imports into Audacity now takes only about an a minutes. Doing the conversion now only takes about 15 minutes.

I had previously considered complaining about the task because Audacity is designed in such a way that I cannot do work on one clip while another is exporting and I cannot run two instances at one due to "possible stability issues". In comparison to the previous burden, though, it seems downright easy.

I suppose I can put the cause down to the ever improving state of comsumer CPUs and disks.

Published by XPost^curses

Several of my domains, guyblade.com, the004show.com, and blade.io (and associated), will be down for the next few hours. I purchased more RAM for it two days ago and took them down in order to install the memory. In the course of doing so, I powered it off before it finished doing its raid writeback leaving both dirty filesystems and dirty parity (I thought it had hung irrecoverably). This should take a little while to recover, at which point operations should resume normally.

Since I built Freasha in the summer after my freshman year of college, I have only made two upgrades counting this one. The first was upgrading the original 40GB disk to a pair of 200GB disks in raid 1. This upgrade increased the machine's memory from the previous 256 MB to 2 GB. The upgrade was prompted by malloc failures when attempting to use git to version some large (100-200 MB) files.

I have always been a bit suprised at how well the machine ran even under heavy load with so little memory. I supose that a large portion of the success is attributable to the fact that I always ran it without an X server and that it ran on NetBSD which is designed to run well in low memory situations.

Regardless, I may need to go through a proper upgrade at some point. Freasha is still running on NetBSD 2 (current version is 5). It is using an ancient 1400+ Athlon Thunderbird. The machine is currently maxed on memory with this upgrade (only two ram slots and I can't find DDR 1 memory in chips bigger than 1GB). Since the machine doesn't have SATA, it will be difficult to replace a drive should one fail. Also, it has two network cards, one of which is a 10-baseT card (complete with BNC connector) which makes moving files to it unpleasant especially since most of my other machines have gigabit connections.

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I preordered the Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days sometime over the summer when there was an especially good deal from Amazon. It arrived last Friday, and I've been playing it off and on since then. Playing a new KH game made me nostalgic, so this evening I dug out Kingdom Hearts II and put it in the old PS2. It remains mostly as awesome as I remember it, but I have found a problem. It appears that my PS2 is beginning to show serious signs of age. The disc tray seems to struggle to eject and it took a couple of tries before it read the (not at all scratched) disc. Looking around, it seems like I can pick up a PS2 slim for about $100, so I may pick one up and put it in the closet for the time when my PS2 finally does give out.

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In mostly unrelated news, I found that Tumblr changed their authentication API at some point. The interesting this about the previous authentication API was that it was added at my request a few years ago when I was originally building up XPost. Regardless, the updates have been made and commited for Tumblr.

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I've been slowly working my way through the recorded 004 shows and cropping them appropriately. This has led to me finding songs that I hadn't heard in years that seriously need to be added to my regular playlists. Examples: Life is Like a Boat Take on Me. As always, all of the shows are available on the website. Interestingly enough, it seems as though the 004 show was promoted to the first hit on Google at some point. I am pleased by this.

Published by XPost

From the time when I began playing on the internet (say 5th grade) up until sometime in late high school, I occassionally created stuff and put it on the internet. At the time, there was no way that I would have been able to purchase or afford web hosting. As such, I made use of various free hosting services that were all the rage at the time. One of said systems was the behemoth known as Geocities. Over time, I accumulated multiple accounts there hosting various things, most of which I can no longer remember at this point.

Now, however, the end of Geocities is approximately 3 weeks away and I am beginning to attempt to pull down these ancient files of my youth before they are lost forever. Geocities has chosen to make this difficult, of course. Firstly, there is no way to batch download files. Instead, you must click each file individually and download it. This is incredibly tedious for even a small site like the ones that I have there. Secondly, the per-hour cap of 4.2 MB/account is still in effect. This means that I can only download about a third of what is on my site before having to wait for an hour before starting again.

Currently, I'm downloading from the oldest of my accounts (which incidentally is the only one whose account access information I can remember). I've rigged up a couple of processes of wget seperated by 65 minute long sleeps in the hopes of pulling everything down today while I'm at work. I can vaguely recall at least two other pages that I had there at times in the past, but have no idea either where they are or what user account information might be associated with them. My hope is to be able to remember such things before the 25 October deadline; though, I fear that it is unlikely at this point. Based solely on the file dates listed on the stuff in the one account I'm currently polling, I'm looking at files from circa 2001. Decade-old login information tends to not stick in my memory very well.

Published by XPost^curses

So, today I got home from work and wanted to check my email. Unfortunately for me, the internet was out. This makes at least two weeks solid where the internet has been out for more than an hour per day. It seems to have started back around the time when we had the fires out here, but that may just be the first time that I can remember. Calling Charter was a huge waste of time. The person on the phone acknowledged that the signal to my house was crappy, but refused to send someone out unless I was here when they came. Since next week is an RDO week, I scheduled them for next Friday morning. Hopefully, that will finally resolve the issue.

In case you're wondering how I'm posting now, I have a backup internet connection. I don't have a quick way to switch over to it, but it does have machines running on it (like my webserver) which means I can use it for important things--like ranting about my internet connection being broken.

In short, Charter sucks.

Published by XPost^curses

My mother called me a few minutes ago. She is in Washington, DC for a coneference of some sort (she's been doing many such things now that my brother and I are both out of the house). She had just received a call from the nursing home where my grandmother is currently residing. My grandmother had gone off on a tirade demanding to know why she was being held at the facility and why she couldn't go home.

Of course, the fundamental problem is that her not knowing either of these things is why she is at the facility. Essentially, for the last several years, my grandmother has been slowly succumbing to dementia. This finally manifested a month or so ago when she had a dental appointment. Rather than going to the dentist, she ended up in a medical facilities building (the type with numerous doctor's offices, labs, etc.) at a hospital across town from the dentist. While there, she told people that she had an appointment with Dr. Beam. For those not aware, Dr. Beam was my (and my brother's) pediatrician when we were very young. He has never, to my knowledge, been in the dentistry business. She was thus admitted to the hospital where the professionals there quickly realized that she had serious memory issues. After a short stay at the hospital, she was moved to an adjoining nursing home where she was to undergo rehabilitation/therapy until she could be moved into assisted living.

Unfortunately, she has thus far caused several serious problems which have continuously complicated the matter. Firstly, there are her periodic tirades where she demands to know why she is at the facility or to know why she's never seen a doctor (hint: she has). Secondly, about a week ago, while angry with my mother (who my grandmother blames for the entire situation), my grandmother threatened to commit suicide in front of medical staff. This led to her being taken to a diagnostic psych ward for evaluation. All of this had led to increasing complications with actually getting her into assisted living. The former one led to her being rejected from one facility due to their inability to have monitored exists (there is serious fear that she would simply wander out of the facility if left unsupervised). The latter has increased the time that she will likely need to stay in the nursing home.

Now, to today, my grandmother had apparently be doing relatively well for the past several days since she has been on medication (both the anti-anxiety kind and the anti-dementia kind). However, her fit today has likely set back the chance of getting her into more appropriate conditions--where she might be able to start adapting to a better environment--by an unknown amount. In a sense, her fate is the kind I fear the most. She has a body which, for her age, is in remarkably good condition. Unfortunately, her mind is so far gone as to make extended conversation with her painful and I suspect things will only get worse from here.

Published by XPost^curses

Mono, the .NET environment in which XPost is written, has a large number of handy libraries that have been written for it over the past few years. Many of these libraries provide invaluable services such as GTK compatibility. Others are more like novelties. One such novelty is the Curses binding set. They allow you to program console things using the .NET framework. Obviously, this has little true use, however, since XPost was already written in Mono/.NET, it provides a decent way to get a command-line client for blog posting.

Unfortunately, the MonoCurses environment has a lot lacking. Firstly, there is basically no documentation. Figuring out how it works essentially requires you to read the source code to see what it is doing with each of the widgets that have been provided. Luckily, the sum total of code for the entire UI framework is on the order of a few klocs, and most classes are more like 50-100 lines. The second issue is that there are some outright lies in the inline documentation. For instance, the inline documentation states that the Move(y,x) function, when called by a container, is relative to the upper left corner of the container. This is a complete lie. Move always works in absolute coordinates. Thirdly, the provided framework lacked a multi-line editing widget. Obviously, such a thing was required in order to make a blogging tool work, so I got to roll my own. This task wasn't so much difficult as it was complex. There were many things that had to be done very precisely else the whole experiences would be terrible. My multi-line editing widget is larger (in lines of code) than any provided widget by about 100%. Fourthly, there are many things which require precise incantations to prevent crashes. The example here is removing a widget from a container. It would seem the simple way would be to simply remove it from its parent using the Remove method. However, doing so results in the program crashing when you attempt to move to the next widget via tab. Instead, you must mark the widget to be removed as unfocusable, tell the parent to set the focus on the next available widget, then remove the widget. This is excessively tedious for something that should be a one-liner. Finally, the renderers for certain widgets seem to do bizarre things without explaination. The ListView widget (which I use for listing the blogs to be included during posting) apparently renders about 6 lines worth of garbage after it finishes listing the items in the list view. I can find no cause for this. I have disabled my custom renderer for it, but find that whenever the ListView renderer is called, this behavior manifests. I find it quite annoying.


Regardless, I have a minimally functional XPost client right now that runs in the happy safety of a console. The next step is to add support for the various configuration options (such as adding blogs).



Published by XPost^curses

This is only a test.

Published by XPost

So, last Thursday, I left for Indianapolis for homecoming. I arrived in Indy at about 5pm local and met my father. He and I went out for dinner to a nearby Outback and talked about this and that. Mainly, we talked about my future job plans and education. I'm not really sure why my father insists on meeting with me every homecoming, but it is not terribly inconvienent, so I don't mind.

I then headed directly for the Theta Xi house in Terre Haute. It was pretty quiet there, being Thursday, but a few people were already there: Luke, Curtis. We ended up wandering to Steak 'n Shake. Thursday was, frankly, pretty uneventful.

Friday was a bit interesting. Chansky had shown up by then and we ended up going to Crazy Buffet for lunch based on a "shake to pick a restaurant" iPhone app of Curtis'. This led us to eating at an all-you-can-eat buffet that had sushi and chicken nuggets bother offered. The more interesting part was the used game store that was adjacent to the buffet. The three of us (K-990, K-991, me) ended up browsing and finding various things. I picked up a Genesis and P.N.03. Curtis picked up about a half dozen random games as well. We also decided that the house needed better video games in the inactive room. As such, we purchased a Gamecube, 4 controllers, Super Smash Bros. Melee, and a memory card. These were appropriately labeled with our roll numbers and then set up in the inactive room. Both the 3 of us as well as many others ended up spending a great deal of time playing it over the weekend. Since the total cost was $60 spread amongst the three of us, I would consider it a very good intestment. It certainly provided at least $20 worth of entertainment for me.

Later Friday, we had the alumni dinner. It was good times. I got to see Dante and Krall who I hadn't seen lately as well as yelling at the actives for not using my previous year's donation as I had ordered. Hopefully, they've chosen to follow my instructions now.

Saturday was a bit more laid back. In the afternoon, I ended up going to see the movie Inglorious Bastards with Trevor and Thom. It was, in fact, quite amazing, and I would recommend it to everyone. Afterward, several of us played a game of Dominion (I ended up playing 4 or 5 games during the weekend and only had to teach it to two people. This was pretty handy) before heading to dinner at Cheeseburger in Paradise. The burger joint was acceptable, but we had to hurry because the alumni meeting was supposed to start at 8pm. Upon arriving back at the house, we quickly found out that the alumni officers are slaps and weren't even there to start at 8. We ended up starting later, but Phil had already left to do his radio show and Thom and I ended up leaving half an hour into the meeting in order to get to our own show. Great job, guys.

That leads, of course, to the 004 show. Our yearly homecoming show went very well. It started with Phil, Thom and myself along with periodic commentary by Katie (the person whose show time slot we were stealing) and two random people from 004. Eventually, we got both Greg and Imani also on the air via telephone which was fun. I have no idea where Andrew was (we'd tried to contact him via text message to no avail). Incidentally, the show is currently available on the website. The "final" version is currently encoding and will probably be available before I finish writing up this post. Apparently, whoever is currently the WMHD sysadmin has screwed up the levels on the ogg stream output because it needed a big gain boost (+9db) in order to be undestandable...

After the show, Thom, Phil, and I went to Steak 'n Shake where we were massively disappointed by their being out of shakes. It is one of the two items in their name; they should never be out of it.

I ended up doing not much at the house after that and crashed on the couch in the inactive room for a few hours. I then woke up at about 3am local and ended up talking with Tookie until like 7 in the morning about this and that. Then, there were a few more hours of sleep before waking up and going to First Wok. After food, there was yet more sleeping for me. Upon waking again, there was gaming and more food. The day ended with Flanders, Meiser, Chansky and myself going to see District 9. It was also a quite good movie though of very different kind.

By the end of that movie, it was already midnight Sunday with me needing to leave for the airport at 5am. I got some lousy sleep in the inactive room before driving back to IND and flying home.

All in all, it was a very good homecoming. I had previously been concerned about whether or not I'd come back next year since, from my perspective, there will be almost no one left at the Theta Xi house who were there when I was there. Nevertheless, it seems like there will continue to be many of my friends returning at least for the forseeable future. As such, I intend to return next year.

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Late last week, I finished Too Human. I feel...conflicted about the game. In terms of gameplay, it had serious issues: there is no way to manipulate the camera, the attack system is just this side of worthless, the enemies are autoleveled such that they take forever to kill, some status ailments are guaranteed kills, the only penalty for death is an annoyingly long cutscene plus some item damage, items take damage, etc. On the other hand, I find the world and its aesthetic fascinating. The basic theory is that in some post-apocalypic future, a group of people have been biologically enhanced so as to become Norse-themed gods. As such, your soldiers think of you as a god, valkyrie--in this case in futuristic armor with wings like one might see in a mech anime--take dead soldiers from the battlefield, and all of the Aesir talk with overly theatric language (that somehow works quite well in the world). Perhaps the most welldone part is the idea of the fairy realm: rather than having a literal land of fae, they have cyberspace which has evolved to be similar with sentient AIs and its own completely seperate visual design from the metallic cold real world.

I suppose ultimately, I cannot recommend the game--it just isn't very fun. Nevertheless, I hope for a (much better) sequel so that the universe can be explored further. If not, I might have to run an RPG game set it in at some point...

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