Oh yeah, I'll probably disable the links if my BW usage gets too high - If you want the really high quality versions then you can grab them from me via imeem
From the days when I was still an astronomer Impact video mostly fragments, looking kinda dated now. Of course I must include my essential link to the most complete map of the inner solar system.
And I recently re-did some density visualizations, a lot. more abstract, but cool in a trippy visuals kinda way.
And finally - the most relevant - is an old movie I made to visualize a comet diverting mission, it's about 10 minutes and if shows a spacecraft flying through space with a nuke intended to give a nidge to an incoming comet. It's not great resolution, but I can't find the high definition versions that were used in a couple of TV shows. There are some ultra high definition stills in a book by Duncan Steel.
I've heard stories of Eastern European DJ's from the late 80's DJ'ing using casettes, they would add a little platter on one of the tape spindels and use this to brake or push the tempo for beatmatching. Not that I'd ever consider this, but respect is due for these DJ's who used what was available to them.
The early house DJ's also used to play stuff off reel to reel tapes - in particular the original mix of Phuture's Acid Trax was chewed up in a tape machine, the version you hear now lacks the original vocal - which is probably a good thing.
I've driven to Defcon a few times and there's a somewhat official convoy which travels from California to Vegas, this convoy has it's own radio station which is usually better than anything you can get on commercial stations;-)
I remember once getting left behind - my then girlfriend (now wife) wanted to get in&out burger, and we had to catch up. Being a DJ I'd submitted a mix to desertcrossing radio, and it was scheduled to be played before we got to vegas. So I spent the next hour or so racing to catch up and get back in radio range. We did get back in time to hear my slot, and we were greeted with the sight of 50+ cars all string out on a hill in front of us with their hazard lights blinking.
Is a PoS 90% of users won't get much use from it.... but as a hacker I've got it doing exactly what I want - it's a linux system so it's possible to get your own apps onto the firmware and customize it in ways that Dlink never intended. It does have a lot of things going for it 1) Ogg/Vorbis support - as an early contributer I'm happy to play my ogg collect - but the metadata support sucks 2) XviD support - again, my codec of choice for video.... except that it has a lot of sync problems and drops a lot of frames/freezes up randomly. 3) Wireless G by default - 802.11b is nmo good for video. 4) Every connector on the backplane you'd ever need.
It's frustrating, since I can dig around I can see how easy it would be to make this thing absolutely rock, but dlink just isn't supporting it. This may be because it's a repackaged Redsonic player....
Anyway... time to get imeem running on this creature;-)
And I've got records from the 50's which still get played.
Personally though, I've just played a game of keeping multiple copies in different places, depending on how irreplacable the content is the more pearanoid I am about spreading it around.
Surely this is kind of pointless - if you haven't downloaded the tracks then you've most likely ripped them, which means you probably know what the track is;-)
Wireless - supplied by Linksys Access point (running linux!) Apple iBook (800MHz/640megs ram) Dell Inspiron 7000 Laptop running Windows 2000 DLink DSM320 providing music + video for the living room
Wired Homemade Athlon Xp 2400 / 1gig memory/5x200gb disks running windows XP mostly for multimedia editing Ancient 233MHz Pentium MMX running Lose 98 for classic PC gaming. Dell Dimension - 2x500MHz Pentium III CPU, 512Megs Memory - Runs Gentoo Linux and is my main server. Motorola Starmax Mac Clone - running Linux - it's my firewall and is pretty darn solid since most exploits target different architectures.
I really wanted to avoid giving Microsoft any of my hard earned cash. Then again it's in the firmware, so if MS subsidise the console price then maybe I can justify it.
It is open source, but nobody seems to do QA on a lot of the modules. I remember looking at the registry keys which were being checked for a Windows Messenger vulnerability and the developer had got it right for Windows 2000 and XP but has basically guessed wrong for NT. It still isn't fixed to this day.
On top of the false positives it's also the scanner most likely to DoS random systems during the scan.
I'm not sure open source really applies any more either, there's some question as to Tenable networks claiming copyright over modules that have been submitted.
OK I'm one of the imeem developers - the first poster is kinda correct we wrote as much as possible in C# to make it trivially portable. The web servers are still running IIS because we've discovered a number of shortcomings in Mono's ASP.Net implementation. I'm the security guy here and I expressed reservations about running IIS, but in the end there were bugs we just couldn't get around when the time came to deplying the web services.
But! the original is also right the servers that run the actual service - the 'supernodes' - they're running mono on top of linux and I am extremely impressed by how well mono handles it all.
It's not played in real time and most GUI implementations are mouse only. I guess you lose the ability to enter text, but that's really only rarely used for engraving and naming items.
After all, PGP/GPG is good enough for geeks, imagine if regular people started using it? Better to release a governement created cryptosystem and make it easy enough for those masses of real people to use. Then once the real people are using it, some of the geeks will switch too, and the NSA can start reading everyone's e-mail again. </conspiracy>;-)
The Socket class is astonishingly broken IPAddresses are frequently imported/exported at Longs - 8 bytes with a sign bit Port numbers are 4 byte signed integers.
Sure, Java doesn't have a signed int or long but.Net does.
Now they introduced a way to get the IP address as an array of bytes, so that you can support IPv6, problem is the constructor that takes a byte array will only accept a 16 byte address, not a 4 byte one for us IPv4 users. On top of this they've deprecated the only other method that can get you an ip address in binary format.
So if you want to serialize an IP address you have to either get it as a Long and cast it to an unsigned int - this generates all sorts of compiler warnings, so forget about clean compiles. Or you can get the address as a byte array and then on reception you have to turn it into an unsigned long.
Oh yeah, there's no documentation on what the environment does about the endianess of IP addresses converted into longs.
Now... we''ve also got the alarmingly bad Select() method which requires you to build lists of the sockets you're interested in and then proceeds to prune these to only leave the ones where activity has happened. Problem is that you can't reuse these lists so you need to construct them every time so you end up spending more CPU on building lists than you do on simply scanning the list of open sockets. Not that it matters,.Net throws and exception if you try to Select() on a list of more than about 30 sockets.
Another retarded design decision is the implementatino of non-blocking IO and EAGAIN, they decided that this should be implemented as an exception. And we all know how fast exceptions are.
Since this is Slashdot - people might have a perverse interest in how I recorded BBC radio to mp3 back in 96/97
I had a good old fashioned FM receiver which I tuned into Radio 1, it got good reception, but not quite good enough for stereo. The output of this went into a Linux PC with a rather expensive signal capture device, which I'd rescued from the trash. This was an old fashioned ISA card which had a 20 bit ADC and I could tune the frequency to almost anything I wanted. This was used by some former resident of the observatory for some scientific work, but, being scientific grade it made an excellent sound card. At least a lot better than the built in sound on my Alpha workstation.
It was installed in an old 486 DX2/66 running linux, I had to write my own driver, I had a lot of time on my hands. This was great for capturing audio, but it didn't have enough disk space for the show or enough CPU for real time mp3 encoding.
Instead I encoded it using Shorten and piped it across the network to a more modern PC which had a couple of gigs of disk space, I could get about 8-10 hours of mono audio on there.
This host would then decode the SHN data and encode it to mp3 using Fraunhofer's l3Enc - a very early command line mp3 encoder which was available for linux. I ran this in the highest quality mode available, since the data was already stored in SHN format. I don't think that there were any machines that could reliably encode realtime mp3 at that time, so this 2 stage process was needed.
Ultimately, I stored the essential mix files to a RAID array made up of 6 1Gig SCSI disks, these disks were mounted in pairs inside cases which were about the size of a PC.
I am recalling this archaic procedure as I'm backing up my entire Essential mix collection to a 300gig disk which is about the size of a book.
One of those rare sports that the Scot's do well at. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that adding a bit more brute force to a pasttime makes it more amenable to us....
I've been a long term user of Pocket Music advance, I had to get my family to send me a copy since for some reason it was never released in the US. (which says a lot about the US gameboy market). I've used it to come up with structural outlines for tracks, not the best sound quality, but a lot more compact than say Reason on my iBook.
But this looks like a huge step up, especially if the output can be fed into other applications in a meanigful way.
Now all I need is an mp3 player with seamless pitch shift (The archos does pitch shifting but it glitces when you change it) and multichannel output/Mixing so I can DJ from a pocket size box.
Well kinda..... Back in 1997 I wrote an mp3 streaming server that was originally intended as the audio equivalent of a webcam I could chat and play music.... obviously this quickly turned into the webs first live mp3 radio station. Problem was that there were no mp3 players that could stream content, I had to give my friends a perl script wrapped around mpg123. (as it happened this script also turned the client into a relay server, creating the earliest p2p streaming distribution system).
So it laboured in obscurity for a while until Winamp added HTTP streaming support and suddenly I could tell all those windows users to download winamp and point it at port 3223 on the server cluster. The code was released under the GPL, and I had a few downloads, but it required some real hackish thinking to get it to work for most people. That's when I started getting job offers in California (I was working as an astronomer in Northern Ireland).
Of course then Shoutcast got released and it pretty much did what mp3serv did, mp3serv promptly became even less interesting. But that didn't matter, because mp3serv was so obscure that nobody ever found it, it was only once there was a proprietory solution that people started to look for an open source solution. Icecast came along, it was much cleaner and smarter than mp3serv, so I took all the good bits from mp3serv and integrated them into Icecast and LiveIce.
That was 1999, by that point I was ready to quit my PhD and take a real job......
The response is what's called an 'aside', a comment which while not directly answering the question provides some information which may be relevant to the greater discussion.
Although it does require unix, and perl, and sox, and curl..... but it does allow you to set up live Ogg/Mp3 streaming from a standard web hosting account which allows you to run CGI scripts.
http://www.djsnm.com/cgicast/
The whole application is under 10kbytes and actually works surprisingly well once you figure out how to encode your audio of choice at the command line.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, I'll probably disable the links if my BW usage gets too high - If you want the really high quality versions then you can grab them from me via imeem
Impact video mostly fragments, looking kinda dated now. Of course I must include my essential link to the most complete map of the inner solar system.
And I recently re-did some density visualizations, a lot. more abstract, but cool in a trippy visuals kinda way.
And finally - the most relevant - is an old movie I made to visualize a comet diverting mission, it's about 10 minutes and if shows a spacecraft flying through space with a nuke intended to give a nidge to an incoming comet. It's not great resolution, but I can't find the high definition versions that were used in a couple of TV shows. There are some ultra high definition stills in a book by Duncan Steel.
I've heard stories of Eastern European DJ's from the late 80's DJ'ing using casettes, they would add a little platter on one of the tape spindels and use this to brake or push the tempo for beatmatching.
Not that I'd ever consider this, but respect is due for these DJ's who used what was available to them.
The early house DJ's also used to play stuff off reel to reel tapes - in particular the original mix of Phuture's Acid Trax was chewed up in a tape machine, the version you hear now lacks the original vocal - which is probably a good thing.
I've driven to Defcon a few times and there's a somewhat official convoy which travels from California to Vegas, this convoy has it's own radio station which is usually better than anything you can get on commercial stations ;-)
;-)
I remember once getting left behind - my then girlfriend (now wife) wanted to get in&out burger, and we had to catch up. Being a DJ I'd submitted a mix to desertcrossing radio, and it was scheduled to be played before we got to vegas. So I spent the next hour or so racing to catch up and get back in radio range. We did get back in time to hear my slot, and we were greeted with the sight of 50+ cars all string out on a hill in front of us with their hazard lights blinking.
Easily my favourite Defcon moment
Is a PoS 90% of users won't get much use from it.... but as a hacker I've got it doing exactly what I want - it's a linux system so it's possible to get your own apps onto the firmware and customize it in ways that Dlink never intended.
;-)
It does have a lot of things going for it
1) Ogg/Vorbis support - as an early contributer I'm happy to play my ogg collect - but the metadata support sucks
2) XviD support - again, my codec of choice for video.... except that it has a lot of sync problems and drops a lot of frames/freezes up randomly.
3) Wireless G by default - 802.11b is nmo good for video.
4) Every connector on the backplane you'd ever need.
It's frustrating, since I can dig around I can see how easy it would be to make this thing absolutely rock, but dlink just isn't supporting it. This may be because it's a repackaged Redsonic player....
Anyway... time to get imeem running on this creature
And I've got records from the 50's which still get played.
Personally though, I've just played a game of keeping multiple copies in different places, depending on how irreplacable the content is the more pearanoid I am about spreading it around.
Surely this is kind of pointless - if you haven't downloaded the tracks then you've most likely ripped them, which means you probably know what the track is ;-)
Wireless - supplied by Linksys Access point (running linux!)
Apple iBook (800MHz/640megs ram)
Dell Inspiron 7000 Laptop running Windows 2000
DLink DSM320 providing music + video for the living room
Wired
Homemade Athlon Xp 2400 / 1gig memory/5x200gb disks running windows XP mostly for multimedia editing
Ancient 233MHz Pentium MMX running Lose 98 for classic PC gaming.
Dell Dimension - 2x500MHz Pentium III CPU, 512Megs Memory - Runs Gentoo Linux and is my main server.
Motorola Starmax Mac Clone - running Linux - it's my firewall and is pretty darn solid since most exploits target different architectures.
I really wanted to avoid giving Microsoft any of my hard earned cash. Then again it's in the firmware, so if MS subsidise the console price then maybe I can justify it.
It is open source, but nobody seems to do QA on a lot of the modules. I remember looking at the registry keys which were being checked for a Windows Messenger vulnerability and the developer had got it right for Windows 2000 and XP but has basically guessed wrong for NT. It still isn't fixed to this day.
On top of the false positives it's also the scanner most likely to DoS random systems during the scan.
I'm not sure open source really applies any more either, there's some question as to Tenable networks claiming copyright over modules that have been submitted.
OK I'm one of the imeem developers - the first poster is kinda correct we wrote as much as possible in C# to make it trivially portable. The web servers are still running IIS because we've discovered a number of shortcomings in Mono's ASP.Net implementation. I'm the security guy here and I expressed reservations about running IIS, but in the end there were bugs we just couldn't get around when the time came to deplying the web services.
But! the original is also right the servers that run the actual service - the 'supernodes' - they're running mono on top of linux and I am extremely impressed by how well mono handles it all.
It's not played in real time and most GUI implementations are mouse only. I guess you lose the ability to enter text, but that's really only rarely used for engraving and naming items.
After all, PGP/GPG is good enough for geeks, imagine if regular people started using it? Better to release a governement created cryptosystem and make it easy enough for those masses of real people to use. Then once the real people are using it, some of the geeks will switch too, and the NSA can start reading everyone's e-mail again. ;-)
</conspiracy>
The Socket class is astonishingly broken
.Net does.
.Net throws and exception if you try to Select() on a list of more than about 30 sockets.
IPAddresses are frequently imported/exported at Longs - 8 bytes with a sign bit
Port numbers are 4 byte signed integers.
Sure, Java doesn't have a signed int or long but
Now they introduced a way to get the IP address as an array of bytes, so that you can support IPv6, problem is the constructor that takes a byte array will only accept a 16 byte address, not a 4 byte one for us IPv4 users. On top of this they've deprecated the only other method that can get you an ip address in binary format.
So if you want to serialize an IP address you have to either get it as a Long and cast it to an unsigned int - this generates all sorts of compiler warnings, so forget about clean compiles. Or you can get the address as a byte array and then on reception you have to turn it into an unsigned long.
Oh yeah, there's no documentation on what the environment does about the endianess of IP addresses converted into longs.
Now... we''ve also got the alarmingly bad Select() method which requires you to build lists of the sockets you're interested in and then proceeds to prune these to only leave the ones where activity has happened. Problem is that you can't reuse these lists so you need to construct them every time so you end up spending more CPU on building lists than you do on simply scanning the list of open sockets. Not that it matters,
Another retarded design decision is the implementatino of non-blocking IO and EAGAIN, they decided that this should be implemented as an exception. And we all know how fast exceptions are.
Grrrrrrrrr
I could go on and on.
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed, he'd be... oh wait never mind
Since this is Slashdot - people might have a perverse interest in how I recorded BBC radio to mp3 back in 96/97
I had a good old fashioned FM receiver which I tuned into Radio 1, it got good reception, but not quite good enough for stereo. The output of this went into a Linux PC with a rather expensive signal capture device, which I'd rescued from the trash. This was an old fashioned ISA card which had a 20 bit ADC and I could tune the frequency to almost anything I wanted. This was used by some former resident of the observatory for some scientific work, but, being scientific grade it made an excellent sound card. At least a lot better than the built in sound on my Alpha workstation.
It was installed in an old 486 DX2/66 running linux, I had to write my own driver, I had a lot of time on my hands. This was great for capturing audio, but it didn't have enough disk space for the show or enough CPU for real time mp3 encoding.
Instead I encoded it using Shorten and piped it across the network to a more modern PC which had a couple of gigs of disk space, I could get about 8-10 hours of mono audio on there.
This host would then decode the SHN data and encode it to mp3 using Fraunhofer's l3Enc - a very early command line mp3 encoder which was available for linux. I ran this in the highest quality mode available, since the data was already stored in SHN format. I don't think that there were any machines that could reliably encode realtime mp3 at that time, so this 2 stage process was needed.
Ultimately, I stored the essential mix files to a RAID array made up of 6 1Gig SCSI disks, these disks were mounted in pairs inside cases which were about the size of a PC.
I am recalling this archaic procedure as I'm backing up my entire Essential mix collection to a 300gig disk which is about the size of a book.
Moore's Law Rocks!
If only for the fact that a certain David Hayter is credited.... AKA the voice of Solid Snake in the Metal Gear games.
One of those rare sports that the Scot's do well at. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that adding a bit more brute force to a pasttime makes it more amenable to us....
I mean the last game he wrote was for Nuon enabled DVD players - the gamecube has a gigantic audience in comparison.
I've been a long term user of Pocket Music advance, I had to get my family to send me a copy since for some reason it was never released in the US. (which says a lot about the US gameboy market). I've used it to come up with structural outlines for tracks, not the best sound quality, but a lot more compact than say Reason on my iBook.
But this looks like a huge step up, especially if the output can be fed into other applications in a meanigful way.
Now all I need is an mp3 player with seamless pitch shift (The archos does pitch shifting but it glitces when you change it) and multichannel output/Mixing so I can DJ from a pocket size box.
Well kinda.....
Back in 1997 I wrote an mp3 streaming server that was originally intended as the audio equivalent of a webcam I could chat and play music.... obviously this quickly turned into the webs first live mp3 radio station. Problem was that there were no mp3 players that could stream content, I had to give my friends a perl script wrapped around mpg123. (as it happened this script also turned the client into a relay server, creating the earliest p2p streaming distribution system).
So it laboured in obscurity for a while until Winamp added HTTP streaming support and suddenly I could tell all those windows users to download winamp and point it at port 3223 on the server cluster. The code was released under the GPL, and I had a few downloads, but it required some real hackish thinking to get it to work for most people. That's when I started getting job offers in California (I was working as an astronomer in Northern Ireland).
Of course then Shoutcast got released and it pretty much did what mp3serv did, mp3serv promptly became even less interesting. But that didn't matter, because mp3serv was so obscure that nobody ever found it, it was only once there was a proprietory solution that people started to look for an open source solution. Icecast came along, it was much cleaner and smarter than mp3serv, so I took all the good bits from mp3serv and integrated them into Icecast and LiveIce.
That was 1999, by that point I was ready to quit my PhD and take a real job......
You can never get tired of this game, frustrated yes, tired no.
http://www.nethack.org/
Not that I could've voted or anything.
The response is what's called an 'aside', a comment which while not directly answering the question provides some information which may be relevant to the greater discussion.
Although it does require unix, and perl, and sox, and curl..... but it does allow you to set up live Ogg/Mp3 streaming from a standard web hosting account which allows you to run CGI scripts.
http://www.djsnm.com/cgicast/
The whole application is under 10kbytes and actually works surprisingly well once you figure out how to encode your audio of choice at the command line.