blarg?

Periodically, my ability to write to my iPod would lock up, and everything would seize. dmesg gave me this:

[4512253.553000] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda2)
[4512253.553000] fat_free_clusters: deleting FAT entry beyond EOF
[4512253.553000] File system has been set read-only

which I assume means that the stock filesystem preinstalled on my iPod is somehow gorked. A quick mkfs.vfat /dev/sda2 cost me all my preferences and forced me to resynchronize, but the error message has gone away and hasn’t comeback. Be really careful where you point that thing, because if you’re not, and point it at the wrong partition, your ipod will probably need to go into the shop.

I’ve changed the my conversion script a little, because once I actually got my videos onto the ‘pod to watch them, they’d hang up periodically – the sound would drop out, or they’d just freeze and bail back to the menu, or whatever. Some small tweaks to the encoding options, but early indications are that those problems are bagged. Also one totally brain-off thing that’s fixed that I hope you don’t notice.

Other than that, once you can goad gtkpod into acting right (the new version does, indeed, sync video, but if your system is anything like mine you’ll need to do a “ln -s /usr/local/lib/libgpod.so.0 /usr/lib/libgpod.so.0” after installing everything from source. Not for any really great reason, but because that seems to make it work. After that, things seem to go swimmingly. So now I get to have conversations where I say that I successfully put video on my video iPod, and people look at me like I must be functionally retarded if I thought that was hard.

Aside from that last bit, I’m going to call that a win.

UPDATE: Nope, still choppy video. Wierd, it’s different things for different files. My copy of Rashomon is just slow, like watching a slideshow. Some just have the sound drop out – pause and restart, and the sound comes back. Some shorter things like music videos play right through. And some videos just stop, and bail back out to the menu.

A fanatic, says George Santayana, is somebody who redoubles their efforts when they have forgotten their aim.

Fingerpointing, today, is left as an exercise to the reader.

From the FFmpeg Download and CVS page:

In short, if you want to work with FFmpeg, you are advised to go along with CVS development rather than relying on formal releases. CVS snapshots work really well 99% of the time so people are not afraid to use them.

I’m special; I’m that one percent. I’m willing to pretend that it’s the top one percent! Special like a fox!.

FFMpeg is a swiss-army-knife media converter. It’s really useful; it’s also total attention-deficit-teenware, but hey, if you’re comfortable butchering other people’s source code, it’s good enough! It’s only got about a hundred different compiled-time options, and the version that comes packaged for Ubuntu doesn’t “do” stuff like, well, basically anything you’d ever want to use it for, and if you don’t like that you can, apparently, choke on it.

But I want to convert my video files, so that I can watch them on my new toy.

The extended entry contains all the gore about how I got the whole thing to actually work, but really, I just want to say that when more than two people use your software, especially when more than two people incorporate your sofware into other projects, running a project with no version numbering or point releases, on CVS access alone is about two parts mind-bending idiocy and one part gibbering insanity. It’s some sort of Heisenberg usability principle; it may or may not work reliably or at all depending on the exact moment your users checked out their code.

Which is why, of course, you’ll need to make some changes to the ffmpeg code, for this to work. I’m sure I’m making this more difficult for myself than I had to, but it’s Linux, so you already knew that. Read on; the funny bit is right at the end!

(more…)

This is a copy of a proposal I sent to the Web Hypertext Application Technology working group mailing list, which elicited some both positive and negative discussion, but didn’t get, I think, a lot of traction. I am not sure how I can market my idea better, if it’s a good idea and without basically nagging people. If you have any suggestions, for the thing itself or how I could sell it better if that’s worth doing, I’d love to hear them.

My proposal is for the addition of a “validate” attribute to the the <a>
element that would let the client verify the content of a link as it
comes in. The client can then put up a warning, present the user with a choice or just silently deny the incoming data depending on a preset user preference.

The validate attribute would describe an algorithm to employ and a result
to compare it to; for example, somebody downloading the en-US version
of FF 1.5 from the Mozilla.com homepage could click on a link like:

<a href=”http://foo.com/mozilla-i686.tgz” validate=”{md5}b63fcdf4863e59c93d2a29df853b6046″>

and the client could verify as mozilla-i686.tgz comes in that it does at least have
the md5sum, or whatever algorithm goes there, that’s advertised.

User notifications could include “no validation”, “successfully
validated” and “(algorithm) validation failed”, and act according to the user’s
wishes in each case. The user can be notified when validation fails, and choose whether or not to discard the download or press on. The user shouldn’t be notified when there’s no validation, because this is usually going to be the case, or when it succeeds, because most users will assume “validation” to equal “safe”.

Your use case for this is when a website relies volunteers to mirroring its files to ease their server load; if one of those volunteers decides to screw you and replaces your file with something malicious, users coming from the home site find out that it’s a bad download immediately, and can delete it without running or installing it.

If badwaresite.ru, or wherever, validates their own malware you’re still not protected, but if you were downloading stuff from badwaresite.ru you weren’t protected anyway, so I think it’s a pretty clear win.

Please let me know what you think.

I got a new toy, and it makes me very happy. Or, at least, I anticipate in the near future that it will.

I got an iPod. Arlene gave it to me, as a gift. I’ll let you in on a secret, here: I think she likes me.

Being a linux weenie, I’m really looking forward to what I’m going to have to do next, “work really hard to understand and/or modify gtkpod”, the linux iPod software. Troublesome. It’s clearly alphaware at this point, and like most linuxy prototypeware, the infrastructure is rock solid and the user interface is a war crime. For example, if you have questions like “how do I get music from my computer onto my iPod” the answer isn’t immediately obvious or easily discoverable. There _is_ music on my ipod now, but I basically got it there by clicking on things at random, and can’t seem to reproduce it for the rest of my collection.

Some of the error messages tell you that you should do X before you “call this function”, but there’s no button or menu item labelled X anywhere. In what you might call the Finishing Move of Linux usability, clicking the Help menu gives you the “About” option, which then gives you the name and version number of the program you’re using, and nothing else. Typical.

This is the Linux Way, of course, but my faith is undimmed! I had to work with Microsoft Word for a while last week to try and do some pretty basic stuff like “change a font” and “edit a table”, and it was just insane how much that experience sucked; Word is totally baroque, the documents almost competely intractable. At least with Linux, I’m beating my head on something that will cave in before my skull.

But, having played with it for a little while, I’ve got to say that it’s just totally obvious why Apple commands something like 75% of the media player market right now.

Update: Here’s a tip for all you gtkpod users out there: don’t try to use it with X-forwarding. Being a KDE user, I don’t know if that’s an artefact of X, the Gnome toolkit or what, but just don’t do it, mmmkthxbi.