Anthology of Interest

Sometimes, when I am bored, I read IRC quotes on bash.org. Here are two good ones I came across: being a Linux user is sort of like..., and this one, which is umm, a little off colour: if you drop a watermelon....

Funny stuff there.

I sucessfully defended my thesis this afternoon. I have a few corrections and one paragraph to add, but I am done. Now to write those papers...

Since my supervisor suggested we try out Skype, I picked up a headset and signed up. I was somewhat surprised that Skype has a Linux client, and doublely surprised that it comes in a Debian package that even goes so far as to create a menu item in the Gnome menus. This is pretty amazing for a commercial software package. It seems to work pretty well. Except for when I was talking to my supervisor I was getting a really bad echo. I thought it was my set up at first, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that her microphone was picking up the output of her speakers and feeding it back to me. Hearing myself with a 1/2 second delay was very distracting.

I have two sound cards in my computer, the crappy on-board nVidia one and a SoundBlaster PCI 128. The SoundBlaster has surround sound, but I don't have the external hardware to take advantage of that. For the longest time I've been wondering how to get the other line-out (the rear speaker channels) to drive my speakers, so that I could leave the headphones plugged into the headphone jack, and stop having to crawl under my desk to switch between them all the time. I finally figured it out yesterday, using the ALSA drivers.

The aplay -l command lists the devices ALSA knows about. The SoundBlaster shows two DACs:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: AudioPCI [Ensoniq AudioPCI], device 0: ES1371/1 [ES1371 DAC2/ADC]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: AudioPCI [Ensoniq AudioPCI], device 1: ES1371/2 [ES1371 DAC1]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Card 0 device 0 is the headphone jack, and card 0 device 1 is the line out/rear channel jack. Since I generally use mplayer to watch movies and stuff using the external speakers, the mplayer command mplayer -ao alsa:mmap:device=hw#0.1 WRC_2004.WMV sends the sound to the speakers instead of to the headphones. I have a user called freevo (but I don't actually use freevo at the moment) which runs its own X server so that the TV out works. I created a .asoundrc file to tell ALSA to use the line out/rear speaker channels by default for that user:

pcm.!default {
  type hw
  card 0

  # Headphones
  #device 0

  # Speakers
  device 1
}

ctl.!default {
  type hw
  card 0
}

I hooked the crappy headset up to the crappy on-board sound card, so now I have three devices hooked up full time, and no more under-desk adventures!

I saw a couple of blog entries on Planet Debian regarding Skype and other VOIP applications: Google Talk And Skype Are Boring, And Here's Why, and Internet telephony: skip Skype, use SIP, and related posts. The amount of open stuff that is out there for internet telephony is pretty amazing, which is nice. I still haven't learned enough to be any kind of knowledgeable about it, but voip-info.org should be able to help with that.

I tried using linphone, but the interface is pretty primitive, but it should work for direct peer-to-peer SIP calls. I also tried Free World Dialup (FWD), which seems to act a SIP proxy to make it easier to connect to other users on the same service, no matter where you are or what your IP address happens to be at the time. I couldn't figure out how to get linphone to work with it, and couldn't install kphone for some reason, but the commercial softphone Xten X-Lite worked ok.... as long as you follow the instructions on FWD's page. The interface attempts to look like a real phone, which just makes it all confusing to use. It does work thought, at least I was able to call the echo service and some other utility numbers FWD has set up.

The good thing about Skype is that it is extremely easy to get started with. You don't have to sign up on a web page. You don't have to think about other services. Everything is included in a single package, wrapped up in a fairly good, easy-to-use interface. Its simple. Using SIP seems to be much more complicated.

The other VOIP thing I came across recently is an article about setting up a PBX using Asterisk. Its crazy what you can do with it. Here is another blog entry about setting up asterisk. Now I want to set up a PBX... but not before doing a freevo/MythTV PVR (which we are bound to use a lot more).

It's kind of ironic that I find myself interested in VOIP, since I don't really like using the telephone we have right now, and since I'm just plain awkward on the phone. Oh well, toys are toys and they are fun to play with, even if one doesn't get a lot of real world use out of them.

I accepted a job offer at the startup Acceleware today. Although the target market is small, the products have potential. Who knows how long it will last, but now is the time to be in a startup, when I don't have any children and while the market is looking pretty good and it shouldn't be too difficult to get another job should things take a turn for the worse. The job is there at the end of September, so I don't have to worry about looking for work when we move back to Calgary, which is a relief.

I must prepare to say goodbye to the days when I could come into the lab at 11:00 am, leave at 3:00 pm, and call it a hard days work (never mind that I did most of my work in my bathrobe at home from 7:00 am to 10:00 am and from 9:00 pm to 2:00 am). In a way, this is a good thing, since hopefully it will be easier to separate work from the rest of life. Except for when it is necessary to pull 14 hour days to meet a deadline. Hopefully that won't happen too often, but maybe I'm being too optimistic. At least the weekends won't blur into the work week to the point where I have no idea what day it is anymore.

On the other hand, I'll miss the flexibility that grad school affords: when there aren't deadlines, it's possible to do stuff whenever you choose. The freedom to research whatever happens to be interesting at the time, even though the supervisor would prefer one to focus on the thesis. Taking walks in the dog park in the afternoon. This flexibility can be hazardous to one's work ethic though. It's possible to fall off the wagon for months at a time and do nothing except play video games, surf the web, and ride the bike. The one thing I remember about my former life in professional software development, it's that having a customer asking you for things can make you do stuff you never though you could do, and in less time too. And so far, it has rarely been necessary to skimp on quality, although write-it-quick-and-fix-it-later became a necessity to finish my thesis work for an August defense.

Tamara and I have our 2nd anniversary on August 30th. Tamara's parents are having a biggish get-together tonight, part of which is to celebrate our anniversary. Rod even bought a bottle of scotch (Balvenie 12 year old 'DoubleWood') for the occasion. We are going to eat BBQ'ed roast beef. Mmm beef. People are arriving, so I must conclude.

Tamara and I have both submitted the paper work so that we can defend our theses. I defend on August 29th, and Tamara on September 8th. I also have to give a seminar on August 23rd. So now my biggest concern is getting slides together for my presentation and doing some reading so that I sound like I know what I'm talking about when I try to answer questions in my defence.

Once our defences are finished, we will be moving back to Calgary. The plan right now is to move at the end of September, so we have started looking for a place to live. Since I haven't secured a job yet (I have an interview on Monday though), we don't know what our budget will be, so its tough to know how much we can afford. A safe bet is probably a student style apartment so that we can save up for the next year or so. The problem with that is that University starts in September and the students are bound to snatch up the affordable housing near the University (we want to be in the NW near the University). We'll be a month later, so we'll have to choose from the leftovers I guess.

At the moment we in Calgary for a family reunion on Tamara's side, and for my job interview. We drive back to Victoria on the 19th or so.

On Wednesday we went to visit my parents. We (Tamara and I, my parents, and my niece) drove up to my parents half section west of Longview. Although I have not eaten as much stuff as Dave, I know that wild raspberries are tasty. We spent a lot of time picking and eating those. Yum Yum Yum!

My dad has an old Bombardier school bus, which is rather like a tank designed to carry people. Or a very large, enclosed snowmobile. Due to the large amount of rain we've had this year, it's the only passenger vehicle capable of getting over the very soggy quarter mile of ground to the water trough where the raspberries are bountiful. It still needs some work unfortunately... the gas tank is inside the passenger cabin and has a bad habit of leaking out the top due to the vented cap. It also doesn't start unless gas is poured into the carburetor. Just as we pulled up to the water trough, there was a large lightening strike up the hill from us. Tamara became very worried about gas fumes just then.

We got out and ate some raspberries. We also came across some goose berries, and my niece asked me why they are called goose berries. I don't know what it is that makes people want to tell tall tales to kids, but I told her that when they get ripe they hatch into geese. It started to rain quite heavily, so we headed back to the Bombardier, which refused to start. Just as we became convinced that we were going to have to walk back, Dad got it going and away we went. Thank goodness, we were soaked as it was!

My father-in-law phoned me up the other day. Someone had mentioned Linux to him, specifically Mandrake. This someone was a little apprehensive about it, but found it quite straightforward once he got used to it. Given that his computer was so badly infected with virus's that it couldn't even run Mozilla mail, he figured Linux might be worth a try. I recommended Ubuntu, since it is based on Debian and I would be better able to help him with it.

When I originally set up his computer, I made space for Linux and tried installing Gentoo on it, just for my own fun (the installation took a very long time and terminated with a strange error, so I gave up on Gentoo). So there was already a partition set aside for a fresh Ubuntu installation. The installation when smoothly, although I did have to install Mozilla Thunderbird, and a few unofficial non-free packages like the Flash and Java plugins. The display driver is much, much faster than the one for XP. I was really surprised about that!

I imported his mail and address book into Thunderbird, copied over his Word and Excel files (which seem to work nicely in OpenOffice.org), and finally copied his digital camera photos. I showed him that he could put an audio CD in and it would automatically play. Attaching his digital camera automatically opens and "import" dialog box, where thumbnails of the photos are visible and clicking "import" downloads the pictures into a folder named for the date of import. The photo, PowerPoint, and video attachments his friends send him seem to work fine. I also showed him how to burn a CD in using Nautilus, which is apparently easier than in Windows.

So after a short intro to Ubuntu, my father-in-law seems impressed. Since he just needs to use a word processor, spreadsheet, digital photo import, email, and browser, Ubuntu seems to work well for him. We'll see how things are after a month or two...

I saw this page about tweaking nVidia driver performance on Linux by happenstance the other day, which lead me to think about playing games again. Now that my thesis is more or less done and I have some free time again, I figured it would be fun to try to finish Half-Life (the original). I may also finish GTA3 eventually.

Since I had some scripts to start GTA3, Half-Life, Counter Strike, etc, I wanted to update them to automatically change the video mode from 1280x1024 to something that works better. I came across xrandr, a command line interface to the resize and rotate extension. It works very nicely for selecting video modes.

Better yet, Wine can be configured to use XRandR itself, rather than XVidMode. XVidMode works ok, but it doesn't seem to actually change video modes. It blacks out the screen and puts the game in a little box in the upper left hand corner, which is kind of annoying. To use XRandR, edit the wine config file:

"UseXVidMode" = "N"
"UseXRandR" = "Y"

I updated my nVidia drivers and my installation of CVS Cedega. After getting all the GL and GLU libraries and the development packages sorted out, I compiled it with GCC 3.4 (4.0 doesn't work, due to some warnings that got promoted to errors). Adding -pthred to the CFLAGS also seemed to help things. I also had to monkey around with the code in a few other places. Apparently CVS Cedega is not for the faint of heart (although it might work better if I actually used the supplied build script). I've heard that the transgaming thing that you can buy is pretty cheap, works well, and is generally very nice.

Steam installed no problem, although the HTML doesn't get displayed. For some reason the Mozilla ActiveX control doesn't work very well, and I haven't been able to get IE6 installed for a very long time. This is not a big deal, as HTML display isn't very important for Steam (unless you want to buy a game or something through it).

Half-Life installed and worked well. I noticed that there is a Half-Life 2 demo available in Steam, so I downloaded that and tried it out. I was rather uncertain that my computer could even run it, so I set the resolution to 640x480 and set all the quality options to low. The performance is very smooth and nice, and everything seems to work pretty well overall. The fonts look like garbage though, but bumping the resolution to 1024x768 helps, and it is still very smooth, even at that resolution.

I had to increase the AGP window in the BIOS to 128 MB, and set "AGPVertexRam" = "64" in the wine config file. It does crash/lockup after changing scenes, but I've read that this maybe due to the PCI slot my sound card is in. The flashlight also did not work, but this page gives a work around for that.

Unfortunately, every time the game saves, it crashes. It does save though, so killing the processes and restarting allow you to continue where you left off. The crash is due to saving a screenshot to go along with the save. Putting msvcrt70.dll and msvcrt.dll in the windows/system32 folder of my fake windows installation got rid of most of the error messages, but not the crash. I wrote this patch so that there is at least a function instead of a 0xdeadbeef address, which doesn't get you a screenshot but does stop the crashes:

1003a1004,1016
> HRESULT WINAPI Direct3DDevice9_GetRenderTargetData(LPDIRECT3DDEVICE9 iface,
>                                                    IDirect3DSurface9* pRenderTarget,
>                                                    IDirect3DSurface9* pDestSurface)
> {
>   ICOM_THIS(IDirect3DDevice9Impl, iface);
> 
>   // Do nothing for now
>   FIXME("(%p)->(): stub\n", iface);
> 
>   return D3D_OK;
> }
> 
> 
1156c1169,1170
<   (void*)0xdead1022, / GetRenderTargetData /
---
>   /*(void*)0xdead1022, // GetRenderTargetData */
>   Direct3DDevice9_GetRenderTargetData,

I'm surprised that I didn't read about this problem somewhere in one of the CVS Cedega guides for half-life 2. <tinfoilhat>Maybe it was recently introduced to help encourage people to buy a subscription to the real Cedega</tinfoilhat>, which I may eventually do.

I though that everything was very smooth, until I turned on the frame rate display, and found that it was averaging about 10 fps for any kind of complex scene. So apparently I just have low standards when it comes to frame rate. It maxed out at about 60 fps if I was staring at a wall. Strangely, the frame rates didn't improve with reduced resolution or fewer features. I'm not sure where the bottle neck is, might be the processor, RAM, video card, Cedega, or something else entirely. There are newer nVidia X drivers available, but they are not in Debian unstable yet. Maybe that willl help.

The engine developed for Half-Life 2, Source, is just amazing. Granted, my 3d gaming experience is sorely lacking, but after playing with the original Half-Life for a while and then playing the Half-Life 2 demo, its just amazing! Amazing! You can pick up stuff and throw it around, boxes tilt, and things roll down inclines. I spent some time playing with a swing set, and found that I could set the swing going and it would oscillate for a very long time. I guess there isn't much air resistance or something, since in real life the motion would have decayed quicker. I was able to stand on the swing and move back and forth, thus swinging on the swing. It was really cool. I put a cinder block on the teeter-totter and jumped on the other end, and the block hopped around a bit. I was hoping it would fly off, but it was probably to heavy. I'll have to try it again with a bottle or paint can or something.

The gravity gun is really cool. The second demo level (chapter 6 in the game, I think) has a lot of things to kill, but not a lot of spare ammo. There are quite a few interesting traps that you can set up to kill things with. There are also an inordinate number of industrial sized saw blades lying around. Its possible to pick these up with the gravity gun and shoot them at things. They cut zombies in half quite effectively. They also tend to get stuck in walls and light posts... I wonder if its possible to make stairs out of saw blades....

In any case, I'm quite impressed with the half-life 2 engine. Too bad my defense is three weeks away... I have to prepare my presentations and shouldn't spend too much time playing games.