Lair of the Wolf

Just your average, ordinary, arch-nemesis

2008-07-30T04:16:29Z

The Right Tool

2008-07-29T01:18:54Z

The Annoyance of Video Compression

2008-07-21T08:32:49Z

This is probably going to be a bit of a rant. After having spent the last few hours playing with trying to get TVersity 1.0 RC1 to properly read and transcode video I captured using a Plextor ConvertX/Intervideo WinDVD Creator 2.. its pretty straightforward video, it captures at 720x480 and compresses using Divx 6 (6.8 is installed on the machine) but annoyingly enough it doesn't use mp3 for the audio, but rather mp2. Which, I suppose is understandable. Unfortunately, its not the easiest format to work with, there's no VfW decoders for mp2 audio that are free, due to licensing restrictions, which makes tools like VirtualDub fail to be able to convert the audio to something more friendly. Where the fighting comes in, is that the digital media player here, the D-Link DSM-320, which is pretty nice, does not support MP2 audio in an AVI. Even though the profile tversity has for the device, which specifies what needs to be transcoded to be able to play vs. what can be played natively, enabling a much wider range of videos to be played, thinks it can. The result, audio that's nothing but skipping static. and lots of it. Eek. Luckly just a simple comment in the profile.xml file for the device telling the software that an mp2 in an avi doesn't work, is enough and the transcoder now kicks in to handle the conversion to a format the player can actually handle. The transcoding feature though, while very nice when it works, can be an absolute headache to get working properly with a variety of formats. Anybody who's saved videos from the web or captured stuff over a long enough time has no doubt collected quite a mess of different formats, even if they only appear to be a few types.. (the container types tend to be nice and misleading to make you think there's only a few.) commonly nowadays, flv, wmv, mov, and avi.. with rm (and ogg) in there somewhere.. this of course, left out all the mpeg, mp4, m4v and the mountain of extensions those use. On top of that, if somebody hands you a .mov, is it H264? MJPEG? or something else? If you're just using Quicktime, its not a big deal, since any type the file can be will play with it, but then you end up with a pile of players installed on your system fighting over file types since they all want to be the one true player, but fail in subtle ways abysmally. As you'd expect though, not everything can just go through the one true player for playback and not expect things to be a bit more compatible, TVersity's transcoder is one of those things. On Windows, which is the only platform for now, it supports, it uses DirectShow to read the videos, so any video you can play in Windows Media Player (or any DirectShow capable player) can be read, and played back to your device. So this brings up the obvious problem, how do you get DS to be able to handle the popular formats? Well, let's start with a (hopefully) simple explaination of how video is played back... The image above is graph of youtube flash video, as it would be opened by directshow. First thing is the container is opened by the appropriate filter, in this case the "FLV Splitter", flvsplitter.ax, which as its name implies "splits" the video into its component parts, which are then read to determine what compressor was used, (for youtube, this is currently H.263 for video with MP3 audio) and the appropriate decompressors are selected and the decompressed data would then be passed to to your soundcard ("default directsound device") and player screen ("Video Renderer"). In my case, both H.263 and MP3 for video is handled by ffdshow, but a variety of directshow filters exist. So, if everything goes well, the flv you saved will now play back in all its glory for you. For quicktime, using mp4splitter.ax ("MP4 Splitter") will usually work since the quicktime format is mpeg4 based. Though some quicktime files seem to like having more quicktime components available, so installing Quicktime is sometimes the only solution. The MediaPlayer classic sourceforge page includes most of these filters, which are really handy. After you get and install the filters you'll need, you'll want to install FFDShow, which is a very nice set of decompressors/compressors for a variety of media types (including all the FLV types, H263, VP6 and H264.) Now for the rant.... Why is all this so hard? Why, to make use of a fairly simple device do I need to install a crapload of filters and decompressors to transcode video that the 'media server' can't even handle... I know I have an above average variety of videos locally to deal with, some compressors like Indeo and cinepak and all the mpeg varients as well as the average quicktime, flash, real and divx videos, and I don't expect the older videos or the more obscure compressors to work, but its not too much to ask for a real error message when they fail, perhaps with some indication whats wrong, Video codecs have long confused users of all skill levels, people just want their computer to work.. not to spend hours trying to figure out which combination of codec and container in their matrix they missed installing software for. If you send Grandma a video of your cat playing with a ball of yarn, having to think about if they have quicktime (which your digital camera was so nice to preselect for you.. ) or not shouldn't be needed. Thats one of the reasons why Youtube and similar sites which, yes, use flash, which most systems have today, its easy and you know on the other end it'll play. And surprise, now that its become easy to share video without the headaches, millions of people have chosen to do so. Its really a great thing. It does come with its own problems though, alot of people have difficulty or don't know how to save or play back web video later, and content authors often probably think their video will only stay on sites like youtube. (thats speculation, but it makes sense to me anyway). Its already been proven that the various organizations and companies that develop these compressors and decompressors and players have no intentions of making that world any easier on the rest of us. Otherwise various platforms would have standard ways (like directshow) and players would actually, provide the filters to enable their formats to play, and not try to lock-in users to use only their players... Now, here comes more fun, though only tangently related to the other paragraphs in this lengthy and wordy post. Now that video is the web's next big thing.. (thanks to youtube and flash player.) the slow, but steady standardization people have decided, that what we really need in the next version of html, is a tag, because we really need to be rescued from the evils of flash-based video. These tags would enable the video to be played directly in the browser, which I suppose, is useful. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee with these tags that the video format you want to use is available on the user's browser. For obvious reasons, standards people want to use Ogg Theora and Vorbis (which most of the rest of the web goes.. what's that? too.) as a baseline of support, which if nobody uses, you're stuck with the bloat of having the code to support. There is a reason all that mess above with hundreds of annoying formats and compressors exist. Technology advances, there's plenty of patents on this type of technology since the implemention of these compressors in media players, etc and the resulting payment of patent-fees for licensing their use cover the R&D costs. Of course, the mainstream web is likely heading towards the use of H.264 (which is being used for HD set top boxes, flash, blu-ray discs, mobile phones like the iphone, and alot more.. ] and MP3 (which at this point, is basically a household name, and probably one of the only formats to achieve such ubiquity in society), which is much more common, and make much more sense, from a pure-logic standpoint, but have licensing concerns for open/free specifications. The result of this rambling between the parties, is a specification that currently, afaik, guarantees the author, nothing, as there's no baseline. its unfinished though, so hope remains. But even then, each browser that implements it, has the ability to implement additional types, via the use of directshow or whatever, so it just brings the incompatible video world right back into the users face. Oh, and thats assuming that all the major browsers decide to implement support... Now i don't think that just leaving it to adobe to decide with its flash player that has been installed on 97% of browsers, what video types should succeed and fail is a good thing, but what exists now, does work. as far as web-video is concerned. (where work, to me = that the average user can succeed in posting silly video from their cell phone or whatever and share it without the technogy getting in the way) What gets standardized, *must* be that easy, or its not worth doing. 10+ years of having completely painful video experience was enough.

Apache and MySQL Authentication

2008-07-20T08:21:15Z

One of the things that has bugged me over time is how annoying Apache's usual file-based passwd files are to manage and deal with. I don't change the configuration very much as a result. adding a new user is tedious, as I never remember the syntax to pass to the utility to create the file, etc. Being on windows, the joys of modules like mod_auth_mysql just didn't work well, (in fact, in my experience, crashed.) and was rather unreliable. So, when Apache 2.2 was first released, I was excited that one of the new features was SQL Database support. Sweet, I thought, only to quickly find out that, it wasn't compiled by default for Windows yet. No big deal, I'm rather used to bleeding edge features being a compile-it-yourself kind of thing in open source applications. Last Fall though, I discovered that the module was included in the windows distributions and set about trying to set things up, following the documentation which instructed me to specify a DBDriver directive to select which driver, and even specifies as an example, mysql. Of course, apr_dbd_mysql.so, as referenced on that page wasn't included, So I set out to find a copy, something I was used to doing for mod_ssl.so, only to find little info, and then to discover, that not only was the module not available by default, it wasn't yet even in the apache source tree but rather a 3rd party because of licensing issues, and further, that in the 1.2.x version of apr-util, it didn't even have dynamic module support for the db drivers, so no such apr_dbd_mysql.so existed without patches to the to eventually become 1.3.x apr-util unstable trunk. Not to be beaten, I decided to give the module a try on my linux apache install, patch source tree here, figure out to reconfigure apr-util to be mysql enabled and rebuidl, then install, then figure out how to convince mysql to get along so authentication actually worked, after a few hours of banging it surprisingly worked, and worked well. Not ready for my other machines though. So, that's alot of history, and here's the good news. since that time, Apache now bundles and is using what was then only a myth, APR 1.3.0. In fact, by default in the windows distribution, you'll actually now have dbdrivers to pick from, pgsql, sqlite3 and oracle. Still no MySQL. I've seen a couple of possible reasons for this, one from the apr-util readme.mysql which suggests licensing issues still apply, not sure if this applies to the httpd distributions or not though. The second, and more important issue I found in a readme.win32 in the httpd-win32 source distribution, also printed here, that the MySQL driver wouldn't compile on windows. Sure enough, after setting up a MSVC6 build enviroment with the appropriate Platform SDKs to build apache, trying to build apr_dbd_mysql-1.dll resulted in several fatal errors regarding the use of "long long" types which VC6 (which the ASF binaries are built with) doesn't support. This turns out to be a known issue, already fixed in apr-util 1.3.2 which has been released. (I fully expect that future apache versions (such as a 2.2.10 whenever that is supposed to be) will likely use this version, and whether or not the mysql driver is built we'll have to see then, but until then...) So I quickly grabbed the windows source trees and after a little bit of fighting with VC6, which i'm rather new to, (No, I don't want to build APR for x64 with VC6 on a Intel 32-bit CPU, thanks) I successfully compiled apr_dbd_mysql-1.dll. After dropping in the configuration from my tests last year, the new DLL into the bin folder and restarting, things seemed to be ok. (Without the DLL of course, you get this error "DBD: mod_dbd not compatible with APR in get_driver" which is a rather cryptic way of saying that APR doesn't have the driver you're looking for.) Pointing my browser to my test directory though, gave me a prompt for password and then promptly, an Internal Server Error (500). doh (Along with this very helpful error message in the log "[error] [client 127.0.0.1] Failed to acquire database connection to look up user 'wolf'") reminding me that the apache mysql user actually needed privledges to read from the new DB table.. Fixing that up, and boom, it works. I have only tested it on a limited basis and haven't tried it in production yet, but much like my previous efforts at compiling, I wanted to share with the great internet masses who don't have access to a copy of VC6 and just want to enable this functionality into their Apache 2.2.9 (or later, most likely, but not earlier, since it requires APR-1.3 to work) to share in my happiness... So here you go, there's no warranty here, and if it fails I most likely cannot help you. That disclaimer aside, go ahead eager one, grab it. :-) It drops right into the standard apache distribution for windows.

apr_dbd_mysql-1.dll
For Apache 2.2.9 and higher only. compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ 6 (SP6) [Zip Compressed, 7.6KB]

Configuration Notes: This is my configuration, scrubbed for passwords and such.. I have it at the end of the general configuration, before my virtual hosts.. Most of it was stolen from the Apache docs, which aside from being a bit vague about DBDriver are pretty good.

Firebot: Scheduled Downtime - Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

2008-07-08T00:26:28Z

This Wednesday, the server that hosts firebot will be down for several hours (during the afternoon/evening EDT) for planned maintenance. This, of course, means that firebot will be offline and not available for your bug watching, tree burning, and factoid requesting pleasure. Thanks.

Things not to do to stay healthy...

2008-06-19T23:59:27Z

Simple list... (1) When cleaning up and moving, dust or wear a mask... (2) Don't stay up for 45 hours straight, including at least 2 hours in-transit (3) All meals are mandatory, even if you can't see straight, eat. Failure to follow these simple steps... results in.. sickness.. ugh.

Here's my life, have a receipt...

2008-06-18T18:00:00Z

So, just got done returning equipment to TimeWarner Cable, (1 DVR, 1 Cable modem and a regular digital set-top..)... its amazing, how quickly you can close an account and end a service you've had for 8+ years , no questions, just hand the lady at the counter some stuff, sign once, and here's your copy.. Good bye.

Having a working server is a thankless job...

2008-06-17T19:03:00Z

Congratulations to the Mozilla Team for releasing Firefox 3! What 's a minor server farm overload between friends?

Dear Countrywide, or future occupant...

2008-06-16T16:00:00Z

Sorry about the mess, its difficult to manage to get yourself out of your home wholesale in only 10 days and handle everything sometimes, so, some stuff gets left behind, oops. -- Wolf, former resident.

In Memory...

2008-01-10T05:26:19Z

Last night, I was told my grandmother, on my father's side, died. I wasn't close to her, in fact, things had occured that pretty much pushed me away from most of that side of my family. Despite that, I do feel for my grandfather. My grandmother has been in a nursing home since a stroke in 2001. When looking up her obituary earlier, I found that her older brother, was listed. Having not remembered beingtold he'd died I looked up his obituary only to be surprised that it was only a few days ago. Having lost a couple of close famliy members a few years ago within a week, I understand how hard it would be to lose people that close. My thoughts are with my grandmother's family. DOROTHY E. BARTO Dorothy Eudene Barto, 76, wife of John F. "Dick" Barto, died Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at a local nursing center. Born Sept. 16, 1931, in Sumter, she was a daughter of the late David Rogers and the late Bertha Galloway Rogers. Mrs. Bartow attended the public schools of Sumter and was of the Baptist faith. She was a retired customer service representative with Sears in Atlanta, Ga. Surviving are her husband of Sumter; three sisters, Mary Richardson and Sarah Marsh and husband, B.J., of Sumter and Esther Tomson and husband, Chester, of Orangeburg; three brothers, Everett Rogers of Sumter, William Rogers and wife, Billie, of Manning and Charles Rogers and wife, Cindy, of Sumter; a grandson, Christopher Crews; and a number of nieces and nephews. She was preceded in death by a son, Donald C. Crews Jr.; two sisters, Jacqueline Rogers and Barbara Bianco; and a brother, David J. Rogers. Graveside services will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday in the Evergreen Memorial Park with the Rev. Dr. Ryan Pack officiating. The family will receive friends from 6 to 8 p.m. today at the Elmore Hill McCreight Funeral Home. Memorials may be made to First Baptist Church, P.O. Box 867, Sumter, SC 29151 or to a charity of one's choice. Online condolences may be sent to www.sumterfunerals.com. Elmore Hill McCreight Funeral Home & Crematory, 221 Broad St., Sumter, is in charge of the arrangements, (803) 775-9386. ---- David J. Rogers ORANGEBURG -- Funeral services for David Julian Rogers, age 67, of 3129 Landing Way, will be held 11:00 a.m. Saturday, January 5, 2008, at Dukes-Harley Funeral Home Chapel with Rev. Charles C. Isenberg and Rev. Larry Jones officiating. Burial will be at 3:00 p.m. Saturday in Evergreen Memorial Park, Sumter. He died Thursday, January 3, 2008, at his residence following an extended illness. Mr. Rogers was born in Sumter, a son of the late David Rogers and Bertha Galloway Rogers. He was owner and operator of the Biddie Banquet for 40 years. He was a member of First Baptist Church in Sumter. Mr. Rogers was an avid fisherman and reader. He was predeceased by a sister, Barbara Blanco. Survivors are wife, Agnes Ard Rogers, of the home; daughters, Pam Addicks (Clark), Richmond, VA, Judy Gay Campbell (Mike), Charlotte, NC and Lisa King (Derrick), Berea KY; son, Thomas "Jamey" Foxworth, Orangeburg; sisters, Mary Richardson, Sumter, Sarah Marsh (Jeff), Sumter, Dot Barto (Dick), Sumter and Esther Tomson (Chet), Orangeburg; brothers, Everett Rogers, Sumter, William Rogers (Billie), Manning and Charles Rogers (Cindy), Sumter; 4 grandchildren, Ashli Campbell, Austin Campbell, Clarke Addicks III and Morgan King. Family will receive friends Friday evening from 6-8 at Dukes-Harley Funeral Home and may call other times at the residence. Memorials may be made to a charity of one's choice. Dukes-Harley Funeral Home «Obituary posted: January 4, 2008»

Nagios Plugins for Windows

2007-07-12T21:40:32Z

So, for me, this is a bit of a random post, as I usually don't blog things like this. I run an installation of Nagios locally, to monitor my network. Its by no means critical, but its nice to know if the server this site is hosted on, is having issues, for example. Its a bit of a complex installation though, as the nagios daemon doesn't run locally, its on my friend's network, (also where I host firebot, the mozbot on irc.mozilla.org. So, to do checks here, I use NRPE, on my linux box here to relay the checks as if the remote nagios host was monitoring things directly. It works very well. Problem is, my linux box isn't on a wired portion of my network, which makes things a bit flakey. So, I decided to migrate NRPE to run on tazdevil, my primary server, but its Win32. which isn't a problem for the NRPE daemon, which has a NT port. It also compiles pretty easily under Cygwin, which gets you the daemon and the check_nrpe plugin, which is useful since I have 3 NRPE hosts here, for the plugins that simply must be run on the local machine. The plugins, on the other hand, are a different matter. While there's some plugins for windows available, some of the more useful ones, like check_mysql, which I needed, weren't. So, after a full night of pain trying to compile nagios-plugins-1.4.9 under cygwin, only to end up with plugins that didn't work anyway (socket errors, etc.). I managed to, yesterday, compile successfully nagios-plugins-1.4.5, which is an older release but it works (same as what I had installed on my linux box), some of them are very linux-dependent, and even cygwin doesn't provide enough *nix for them, such as check_icmp. So, to save people in the future looking to do this themselves some pain. I decided to package and provide the binaries for both nagios-plugins-1.4.5 and nrpe-2.8.1. They include the relevant required cygwin dlls, so a cygwin install is not required, and were compiled using GCC 3.4.4. Nagios-Plugins 1.4.5: Download NRPE 2.8.1: Download These are provided in the hope they'll be useful, but are not warranted in any way, if they work for you, great, if not, you're on your own. (There's some testing notes in the nagios-plugins package, but the nrpe package hasn't been tested, except for the check_nrpe plugin, which works fine for me, the only reason I built it.) Though, if you want to contact me, you can at spamtrap@psychoticwolf.net. One other note, if you decide you want to try compiling the plugins yourself under cygwin, after you run ./configure edit the makefile in plugins/makefile, and edit libexec_PROGRAMS (line 46 or so) so that negate and urlize are at the end, also make sure that all the names have $(EXEEXT) after them. This will avoid the bogus cannot find header errors that seem to occur to any plugin after negate/urlize, as the plugins build system clobbers its include path building those plugins and fails to bulid anything after. (This is what I spent the first night fighting, quite frustrating as the check_mysql plugin I wanted was the first after urlize. ugh.)

Like You

2007-04-05T08:27:54Z

Stay low. Soft, dark, and dreamless, Far beneath my nightmares and loneliness. I hate me, For breathing without you. I don't want to feel anymore for you. Grieving for you, I'm not grieving for you. Nothing real love can't undo, And though I may have lost my way, All paths lead straight to you. I long to be like you, Lie cold in the ground like you. Halo, Blinding wall between us. Melt away and leave us alone again. Humming, haunted somewhere out there. I believe our love can see us through in death. I long to be like you, Lie cold in the ground like you. There's room inside for two and I'm not grieving for you, I'm coming for you. You're not alone, No matter what they told you, you're not alone. I'll be right beside you forevermore. I long to be like you, sis, Lie cold in the ground like you did. There's room inside for two and I'm not grieving for you. And as we lay in silent bliss, I know you remember me. I long to be like you, Lie cold in the ground like you. There's room inside for two and I'm not grieving for you, I'm coming for you. -- Evanescence (The Open Door), 2006

The Hermit

2007-01-19T11:48:15Z

You are The Hermit

Prudence, Caution, Deliberation.

The Hermit points to all things hidden, such as knowledge and inspiration,hidden enemies. The illumination is from within, and retirement from participation in current events.

The Hermit is a card of introspection, analysis and, well, virginity. You do not desire to socialize; the card indicates, instead, a desire for peace and solitude. You prefer to take the time to think, organize, ruminate, take stock. There may be feelings of frustration and discontent but these feelings eventually lead to enlightenment, illumination, clarity.

The Hermit represents a wise, inspirational person, friend, teacher, therapist. This a person who can shine a light on things that were previously mysterious and confusing.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Everything Burns

2007-01-04T16:31:02Z

[ANASTACIA] She sits in her corner Singing herself to sleep Wrapped in all of the promises That no one seems to keep She no longer cries to herself, No tears left to wash away Just diaries of empty pages, Feelings gone astray But she will sing [CHORUS: Ben Moody / Anastacia] 'Till everything burns While everyone screams Burning their lies Burning my dreams All of this hate And all of this pain I'll burn it all down As my anger reigns 'Till everything burns [ANASTACIA] Ooh, oh [BEN MOODY] Walking through life unnoticed Knowing that no one cares Too consumed in their masquerade No one sees her there And still she sings [CHORUS: Ben Moody / Anastacia] 'Till everything burns While everyone screams Burning their lies Burning my dreams All of this hate And all of this pain Burn it all down As my anger reigns [BEN MOODY / ANASTACIA] 'Till everything burns Everything burns (Everything burns) Everything burns Watching it all fade away (All fade away) Everyone screams Everyone screams.. (Watching it all fade away) Oooh, ooh.. (While everyone screams) Burning their lies Burning my dreams (All of this hate) And all of this pain I'll burn it all down As my anger reigns Til everything burns (Everything burns) Watching it all fade away (Oooh, ooh) (Everything burns) Watching it all fade away... -- Anastacia (Featuring Ben Moody) - Pieces of a Dream (2005)

New Photos in the Gallery

2006-11-08T02:02:35Z

OK. So, I've been thinking about doing this for weeks and weeks, (maybe months even...), I (finally) posted 5 new albums in the gallery. 2 of them are from 2005, Full Moon (which is the full set of images that I blogged about in Exploring the Night Sky, some time ago) and Lake Trail @ Crowders Mountain, which is from my first visit, before the Pinnacle hike. The remaining 3 are from this year, i'll just list them here, since they've got a more detailed descriptiion on the album pages. - Pond @ UNC Charlotte - Storm Clouds - UNCC Random / UNCC @ Night