Jon Simpson’s Weblog

Further to my earlier attempts at compiling mplayer from cvs, the bugs that were previously causing errors in the compilation (I believe, due to library dynamic/static linking strangeness and the stripping of symbols) have been fixed quite a while now and I’ve been enjoying up to date builds of mplayer on Mac OS X Tiger.

There are several great reasons to be running a CVS build of mplayer on OS X if you watch a lot of multimedia, mostly in increased performance, but also a lot of bugs have been worked out of the macosx video output driver, and there’s now a very cool transition as the window fullscreens, scaling out to meet the dimensions of the screen. Also, by running mplayer with the latest version of libavcodec (ffmpeg), improved support and performance for media formats comes as an added bonus. Read the rest of this entry »

This weblog got its 2nd redesign yesterday (after the last one, 5 months ago), and I’m currently working through it trying to find any elusive markup or CSS bugs. I coded this one pretty much from the ground up as strict XHTML and CSS, and everything seems to be looking pretty much how I want it right now (with the exception of a few missing pages here and there..). As the title implies, I’ve decided to try something more than skin deep and will be trying to update at least every couple of days with something of value. Too many things take up my time, and there are a lot of subjects I’d like to write about. Time will tell..

In the real world, things happen in parallel. As I type this, people and objects around the world are doing everything imaginable, in parallel to my typing. Computer programs, traditionally, follow as a set of instructions that are run in order, one after another in a simple step by step execution. Parallel languages provide syntactic structure to let us instruct the computer to run blocks of code at the same time as each other, and break out into new processes running concurrently (more on this in a future post). Java allows us to do much the same thing via threads. Read the rest of this entry »

So, CSCS week 2 was all about SodaRace, a rather cool java based environment for building small moving objects/things. The concept seems pretty straightforward, you can add a muscle (push/pull) reflex to lines that make up your object. There’s a vast layer of depth concealed by this, and just getting simple shapes to move or stand upright seemed pretty difficult from where I was sitting (although I wasn’t 100% together yesterday).

A lot of people built interesting objects that flailed and moved about, which was pretty interesting. There are some amazing demos available within the Sodarace environment, but just getting something to move cohesively seemed to be a pretty big achievement. It was great to see a lot of people really having fun and enjoying what they were doing. I wish I could have taken more from this session, but I seem to have been struck down with a post-dated freshers flu (overdue from my first year, maybe..)

This session definitely achieved its goal of being ’simpsons-like’ in nature, and it should be interesting to see the progression under this new format. Hopefully, this should be another good year for CSCS.

Note: Matt still hasn’t drawn a map yet.

This is fast becoming a trend, but this post is directly in response to a number of posts by Matt regarding the UKC CS department’s website. To give some context to my own take on this, its worth noting that my business is heavily based around various web applications and web sites, and I have great interest in the use of both blogs and RSS as mechanisms for content publishing.
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OS X’s weird changes to the unix layers on which it builds are usually bearable. Mainly because they don’t get in the way, or create any real problem in everyday use (Including the fact that the Finder loves to hide unixy pieces of the filesystem away). However, sometimes it can be a real pain in the ass.

Take for example, compiling MPlayer from CVS for the operating system. Now on 10.3, this worked great and was a good way to get a nice fast media player to use from the commandline (I use mplayer on all of my systems for media playback, so I can bear with its commandline-based interface). After upgrading my Powerbook to 10.4, I’m suddenly hit with the following error message when compiling
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So Matt’s been blogging recently about the options faced by people maintaining several reasonably sized web sites. I figure I’ll add my 2 cents on the issue, if only to follow up on my earlier post about the joys of dedicated server-dom.
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Ok, so Google Talk is the latest and greatest thing coming from the search behemoth. No doubt it’ll spark a share price rise, along with tense speculation of a Google entry into VOIP or anything else related to instant messaging or the service itself (as such hysteria has become commonplace surrounding the Mountain View based company). Read the rest of this entry »

For a while now I’ve been working in the internet field, with a few websites that make a tidy sum of money each month. For a long time they’ve all been hosted on a shared account I’d had for some time, which had previously been used for small personal projects and had mostly been co-opted into doing the job for the bigger and demanding sites that were increasingly coming up. Having the fate of my business critical webapps out of my hands was beginning to be a bit of a worry, so I decided to move all the sites to a dedicated server over at ServerBeach. I thought I’d post up a few interesting notes on the transition, as its not one I’ve seen commonly documented.
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Courtesy of Slashdot, the FlockBot project aims to create an open design for a $800 robot capable of multiagent research. This isn’t the interesting part (for me, at least). That comes in the equipment list they quote for the project. (non-interesting/relevant parts cut)

A 200MHz Bluetooth-enabled Gumstix Linux computer with wireless TCP/IP
An Acroname Brainstem motor controller
A tilt-servoed CMUCam2 camera
A servoed gripper capable of grabbing small cans, with intrusion sensor
Five IR range finders
I2C
A five-cell NiMH battery pack

Now, this equipment list shares several key elements with the equipment used for CSCS’s pda-based robotics development that’s gone on over the course of the last year or so, and I think its interesting to see how we seem to have been working with a very good selection of pieces for building solid & functional robotics. The PDA issues we experienced seemed to destroy any momentum that was going on, and obviously the other setbacks didn’t help much. Seeing this however, has lifted my expectations greatly as to what *could* be achieved in the space, and I’m interested to see if anything can go forward from this next year.