Alex Belits

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

For a reason that I don't understand

j_b asked me to write a review of Avatar. This is the result:

( tl;dr and spoilers )

After The Great TV Transition To Digital, Comcast for a while kept transmitting everything in analog NTSC, so I was able to use my Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 for cable, and occasionally watched over-the-air ATSC with HVR-950. It was clear that this was not going to last, and recently all but few NTSC channels disappeared. On top of that, when HVR-950 didn't get a sufficiently strong signal or was otherwise confused, a combination of its hardware, driver and MythTV 0.21 ended up in some weird state that prevented all further tuning until full driver reload, so over the air reception was quite far from the painless experience that I remembered from pre-cable, pre-digital days. Upgrade to MythTV 0.22 gave me some improved HDTV output modes, but didn't do anything to reliable ATSC reception, and definitely didn't turn PVR-250 into a digital decoder -- something had to be done. My 40th birthday was an acceptable excuse to buy another device, so after some research I went to Fry's and brought home HDHomeRun -- a networked dual-tuner digital TV receiver.

Not surprisingly, installation and configuration were quite painless -- receiver got its address from DHCP, MythTV detected the receiver and its two tuners, ran a scan on both, and found a bunch of channels. Just as not-surprisingly, SchedulesDirect produced a channels list full of mis-identified channels (apparently radio stations that were recognized as TV), so the list required some tweaking before becoming usable.

The surprising part was playback. For a completely unrelated reason I have recently upgraded my NVIDIA graphics card, and the new card supports VDPAU. Before installing HDHomeRun I have spent some time tweaking MythTV to make HDTV play on a 1680x1050 monitor with my old AMD Athlon XP 3200+ and HVR-950. In the end everything up to 720x576 was set to ffmpeg decoder, Xv output, Yadif deinterlacer, denoise3d filter, everything above -- NVIDIA VDPAU, Temporal deinterlacer. Most channels played smooth, however it seemed like the time spent getting the high-resolution frames from HVR-950 was sufficient to cause some choppiness -- or maybe it only looked like that due to some dropped or corrupt data because I only tested it with over-the-air reception. With HDHomeRun this problem disappeared -- flawless playback on cable channels regardless of resolution, occasional visibly corrupt frames on some over-the-air channels, but no choppiness.

For some reason closed captions (and only closed captions, not other forms of overlays) on some resolutions cause massive slowdown and dropped frames. Low resolution (with all-software decoding and Xv output) is fine, high resolution (hardware decoding and high-resolution overlay) is fine, medium resolution (apparently higher-resolution text overlay on lower-resolution hardware-decoded video) has problems. Other than that, I have a fully-functional TV and DVR that receives cable and over-the-air TV, on a box with Athlon XP 3200+ CPU and a five years old motherboard.

Obviously, the whole thing only works with non-encrypted channels -- if by any chance Comcast will decide that they should DRM the Hell out of their network, everything will be broken again. Hopefully sanity will prevail, and the amount of breakage that it would inflict on all other existing subscribers will keep them from going into that direction. PVR-250 still receives some NTSC channels, and HVR-950 is still connected for its analog video input and may potentially be used as a backup tuner -- if I (or driver developers) will find out how to keep it from getting stuck.

Tags: hardware software linux

For a long time I did not post anything here. I felt that I should provide some clarification about my (usually unflattering) description of Americans and American society, yet any attempt to express it in an entry ended up being too long and barely readable. Without finishing that entry I didn't feel like posting anything else, so I had to finish or abandon it at some point. The following is still too long, however it serves a purpose of clarification by being umm... clear.

( tl;dr )

In modern American culture right after two greatest values that are proclaimed to be celebrated the most -- "freedom" (whatever kind of freedom it is supposed to be) and money -- there is "individuality". And just like with first two, overwhelming majority of population lacks everything but the most rudimentary forms of it -- most of people have all their thoughts borrowed from one of the few "camps" ("conservatives", "progressives", "poor me, trying to survive", "technocrats" even), tastes borrowed from one of few popular styles, etc. Genuine interest in anything but few "popular" areas is extremely rare, people rarely diverge from cookbook solutions, fixed aesthetic styles and ritualized social behavior.

Some are quick to blame improvements in mass media and communication. If one has inclination for something popular, he won't have to look past his TV to be presented with multitude of carefully prepared, selected to fall smack in the middle of the range, role models. If he has inclination toward something unpopular, he will likely find a massive crowd of people into the same thing on the Internet, and will follow them, mimicking whatever grown to be popular among the group he joined -- no matter how bizarre or sick.
( Read more... )

I believe, I have an announcement to make -- as of last week, I am no longer poor.

Of course, such announcement goes against traditions of society, and the very fact of me no longer being poor can be disputed depending on the standards of "poor" -- by some I never was poor in the first place, by some I am still poor. I reject the first -- tradition -- because it obviously exists not for the benefit of those who follow it. It prevents people from learning important details of their friends and neighbors' lives and the condition of society as a whole. That leaves it to media and advertisements to paint a picture of either prosperity where the reader is the last person who still didn't benefit from it, or of doom and gloom where the aforementioned reader should be thankful for his supposedly uncommon position of financial stability among the sea of horror and chaos. Also this event is an important illustration to some points I am trying to express in the following long rant-like text, so it has to be brought up.

The second can be countered by presenting a definition that is superior to all others -- a poor person is someone who has to routinely inflict permanent harm on himself and others that he would avoid if he had sufficient wealth or income. In my case this is demonstrably true -- over the last few years I had to tolerate very constrained living conditions, had to eat food of inferior quality compared to my normal diet, delayed some dental care procedures, kept my car grounded due to disrepair and insurance cost thus wasting mine and other people's time when I had to go anywhere beyond San Francisco, imposed my presence on my friends who would be better off without it, missed many opportunities to learn something interesting and useful, and limited my participation in Free/Open Source software development to bare minimum. Considering that despite my still supposedly youthful looks I am almost 40, I count all those things as permanent harm. From this point all my self-destructive activities are strictly voluntary, therefore I am no longer poor.

In terms of absolute dollar value, my primary bank account briefly overshot $10k, and then returned back to that level as I made payments for my previously maxed out credit cards, returning my total amount of debt to about the same $10k. About $1900 that previously was spent on mortgage and maintenance of my Denver condo is now off my monthly expenses list, thus returning some sanity to the whole situation. Yes, it takes that little (or that much) to make a difference between deciding which bills to skip this month and living somewhat normal human life.

As it is probably obvious by now, the reason for this whole event was very simple -- after almost two years of being unused, the Denver condo was sold, so I no longer have to pay for two apartments, the larger and more expensive of which I couldn't even use. I am renting a relatively small but nice apartment in Emeryville, in a building that survived last major earthquake unharmed, it is a 40-minutes walk to my work, and I find it to be a perfectly acceptable living arrangement. The amounts of "debt", "interest", and supposed "loss" I taken by selling the condo below the initial price are utterly irrelevant -- what is important, I have actually spent $50k of down payment in the end of 2001 buying the condo, paid $1700-$1900 per month in mortgage and maintenance payments, and got back about $8k when it was sold. The rest is for all practical purpose is a bunch of fictional money shuffled between banks and mortgage companies in a process that people are finally starting to call by its true name -- the credit bubble.
( Read more... )

If anyone was following the news about massive bailout of American financial companies, he probably heard about AIG and its brilliant decision how to use some of those money -- that is, placing them directly into the executives' pockets. Uncharacteristically for American government, US Treasury insisted on changing that, and apparently AIG will have to bring executives' salaries closer to the sane level, however AIG Chairman insisted that some "bonuses agreed to in 2008, before the firm's problems became known, could not legally be blocked", and therefore tax dollars are still going to line the pockets of those people.

O RLY?

Since apparently everyone involved is either a crook or an idiot, here is a solution that taken me a whole 20 seconds to find: if they won't do it, tax 100% of those bonuses. Yes, government can do that. No, I don't expect it to happen.

Not electing the worst candidate into the highest
office in the country: .......................... PASSED

Universal healthcare: ........................... Pending

Re-industrialization of economy: ................ Pending

National public school curriculum: .............. Pending

Replacing prison terms for nonviolent
drug-related offenses with medical treatment: ... Pending

Ending Iraq war: ................................ Pending

Ending Afghanistan war: ......................... Pending

Closing Guantanamo prison: ...................... Pending

Patent reform: .................................. Pending

Election campaign finance reform: ............... Pending

Limits on corporate power, oversight over
monopolies and financial companies,
responsibility for fraud, legal harassment and
deception of the public, perpetrated by
companies: ...................................... Pending

==========================================================

OVERALL GRADE: .................. STILL FREAKING RETARDED

Congratulations.

I haven't posted anything in a while, so here is another photo of myself.

( Photo )

I finally made Ubuntu properly suspend and resume on XO, so now I don't have to wait for it to boot up when I carry it around.

Today a story was posted on Slashdot about a previously uncontacted tribe in Amazon forest, with one of the photos showing archers in war paint shooting arrows at the helicopter while some other tribesman (or maybe woman) standing nearby.

Here is my take on that:

Current Mood: amused

I made a video of my XO running Ubuntu. Nothing really unusual -- booting up, using wireless networking, running Firefox, watching Youtube video, running OpenOffice.org writer simultaneously with Firefox in 256M without swap, rotating the screen and switching backlight on and off:

Part 1
( Video )

Part 2
( Video )

As usual, all video capture, adding titles and format conversion was done on my Linux desktop. Camera is previously mentioned Sony DCR-TRV320, titles added in Kino video editor.

Tags: hardware, linux, olpc, software

I have posted Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) installation procedure and files on OLPC News forums. Here is how it looks like:

( Photos of the whole process )

Xfce desktop

( ... )

For now, this is the easiest way to install it -- and since it works using XO itself for building the boot filesystem, it can be done by people who don't have other boxes running Linux. I will also post the "from scratch" installation procedure that produced those files I have placed into tarball -- they were installed in chroot environment starting from debootstrap.

Edit: I have posted the update with "from scratch" procedure.

Tags: hardware, linux, olpc, software
Current Mood: accomplished

I was walking in San Francisco Chinatown, and this ad attracted my attention:

( Read more... )

Tags: photos
Current Mood: bored

Some people recently asked me about my impressions about XO-1 laptop that I have mentioned one of my recent posts.

( Read more... )

Tags: hardware, linux, olpc

How you park a bicycle in Berkeley, a world-famous college town:

How you park a bicycle in Emeryville, a yuppie enclave surrounding the IKEA store on I-80:
( Photo )

How you park a bicycle in Oakland, directly in front of the gates of MacArthur BART station, the largest subway transfer point in the whole San Francisco Bay Area:
( Photo )

When visiting a Borders store I have encountered a UI deficiency of the kind that I have never seen before:

Current Mood: amused

From left to right, bottom to top:

Playstation 2, controller, unrelated assorted remote controls (under the desk)
Western Electric Model 500 phone (made in 1952).
X-10 CP290 control panel with RS-232 interface.
Desktop computer (Athlon XP, Gentoo Linux). Among other things, runs Asterisk PBX and MythTV.
Rabbit ears TV antenna (used to receive HDTV channels with Hauppauge WinTV HVR-950 USB tuner and grabber attached to the desktop computer).
Linksys SPA2102 dual analog phone adapter (connected to the phone with LPT300 pulse to tone converter)
Two Linksys WRT54G wireless routers (top one running DD-WRT, bottom one running customized build of OpenWRT with the usual networking software plus Asterisk PBX, acting as a proxy/redirector for phone adapter and another Asterisk on the desktop computer).
Averatec 2150 laptop computer running Ubuntu Linux. Two mini-dongles (receiver for Logitech VX Nano wireless mouse and Kensington Bluetooth USB Micro adapter) can be seen in its USB ports on the right side of the case.
Dual gooseneck desk lamps. Bought in 2000 with bakelite lamp sockets and external cords -- since then old sockets crumbled and were replaced with stamped brass sockets, and cords pulled inside the goosenecks. Controlled by X-10 switch.
Sony DCR-TRV320 DV camera (attached to the desktop computer with firewire, records DV on 8mm tapes).
Porcelain mug and a teaspoon.
IBM Model M keyboard (42H1292, a relatively late version with blue logo, built in 1999 in UK).
Hauppauge remote control that came with Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 (behind the keyboard, used to control MythTV).
Infrared receiver for the remotes attached to the bottom of the screen.
LG L226W widescreen monitor.
Mechanical alarm clock.
Logitech V450 laser mouse (wheel tilt is supported and mapped to Alt-Reft and Alt-Right to be used as "back"/"forward", this mouse and the Model M keyboard are shared between all three computers using synergy).
OLPC XO-1 laptop, running Ubuntu Linux from an additional SD card.
Macally iOptiJr mouse connected to XO laptop.
Altec Lansing VS-2121 speaker (left speaker is behind the Averatec laptop, subwoofer is under the desk).
AC adapter for LG VX8300 phone that I have mentioned before.

Current Mood: bored

After moving to Emeryville I got a local phone number and installed a phone. That would be way too ordinary thing to mention if not this:

The service I have is AT&T DSL line, with no phone service. It doesn't even have a dialtone.
The phone itself is an old rotary phone made by Western Electric (then a part of AT&T).
The phone service is Voicepulse Connect VoIP service.
Asterisk PBX on my home desktop, Linksys SPA2102 dual FXS networked adapter and LPT300 pulse to tone converter (SPA2102, just like all other adapters of this kind, does not understand pulse dialing, produced by rotary phone).

So I have AT&T line, AT&T phone, but not AT&T phone service in any form.

Since SPA2102 is a dual adapter, I have another phone connected to it -- I can even call my own number from it, and it will ring on another phone because Voicepulse Connect allows four simultaneous calls. If neither phone is picked up, Asterisk forwards call to my celphone.

And yes, that's my phone number on it. My old Denver phone number works, too.

Tags: at&t, hardware, photos, voip
Current Mood: amused

I have just noticed that my computers made 150 frames:

for Electric Sheep screensaver, that looks like this: ( large flash video loop )

For at least four months I carry a celphone that looks like this:

(yes, the first image is a composite, -- I still have not unpacked my lamps, so I had to take separate photos of LCD and the whole phone to compensate for poor light).

No one notices anything wrong with it.

Tags: at&t, hardware, photos, verizon