Sunday, 18th December, 2005

Pipes and Cats

Right. I don't care if this is boring or not. It's just something I really really have to write about seeing as how (a) I've spent all day staring at this screen trying to make this thing work, and (b) everyone else (with a prelediction for wearing clothing more suited to members of the opposite sex who are 20 years younger than them) is living the high-life in That London™, noshing on grub, and knocking back whatever the booze-de-jour is.

Probably Bacardi Breezers, I'm led to believe

In the spirit of that, incidently, and seeing as how I've managed to miss closing time at the off-licences, I will be drinking neat Bacardi throughout writing this.

Because it's all I've got in the house

...

Things should, I believe, just work. I'm often amazed at the hoops some people jump through to get even the seemingly simplest of task done. If you trawl through various messasge boards and user groups online, you find scores of examples of people explaining the convoluted things they have to do just to get some music playing.

For example. About two years ago, before the dawning of the AirPort Express days, I used to use X11 on my laptop to connect to my server which was plugged into the stereo, and run a window-shared (?) instance of xmms, just to have music playing.

It wasn't, I have to say, an ideal solution.

Then along comes my AirPort Express, coupled with Salling Clicker on my k750i, and I'm now able to wander round the house, flicking through playlists (incidently, all my playlists are crap — I told Mike what I listened to once, and he hasn't spoken to me since), and it just works.

The thing is, I guess, that I've got this strange notion in my head that, well, computers are there to make life easier. They're basically grunt machines aren't they? They specialise in repetitive tasks, and so, if you find yourself doing a repetitive task, wouldn't it be great if a computer could take over it for you?

(I remember, just changing the subject for a seconds, vaguely reading about something that MacOS 8 — perhaps — was promised to do, which was notice when you were doing the same thing over and over again, and offer to take over. Or maybe I dreamt that)

I like it, you see, when computers remove al the hassle from life — but I think that in the current climate, there's more of a tendancy for them to add to the hassle.

Take, for example, watching television and recording shows to watch later. Now, sad as I am, I am particularly fond of a little woodworking show that airs on Discovery Real Time every lunchtime. But I always miss it, because I'm usually doing something else.

True, I could set up my Sky+ box to record it for me, but it only has a 40GB hard drive — what if I want to archive the shows off onto DVD or something?

Sky, of course, being run by "Evil Tyrant Rupert Murdoch", don't really want me to do that. So they encrypt their files meaning that if I ever did take the hard drive out, I wouldn't be able to do anything with them.

True, I could hook up an analogue->digital convertor and manually record all the shows to my Mac, but that would kinda miss the point wouldn't it?

Granted, there are Digital Rights issues going on here, but I find it hard to believe that with the power of the things we have around ourselves right now, doing stuff is such a hassle.

...

Do you remember all those Tomorrow's WOrld shows back in the Eighties when they showed us what the Homes Of The Future™ would be like? They were all going to be fully automated, lights coming on by magic, little elves massasging your feet, pixies controlling the thermostat. And while I know that you can cobble a whole system together using those X10 boxes, it's a little bodgy if you ask me.

Technology should be seemless, it should do what it's supposed to, and nothing more. And it should do it in the background...

...which is all just a little bit of banter to give me an excuse to mention this sodding collection of scripts that I've been working on all week.

OK, so I managed to get everything working over in Leeds so all you have to do is throw a .mov into a folder and a whole system of AppleScripts and bash scripts leap into action, converting your film into a multitude of different formats (even non-QT7 formats for those whose XP machines lock up at the slightest mention of "h264"), pushing them around the web and the network until everything is in its right place, and updating a database so that within 24 hours half the planet (who subscribe to podcasts) will have seen your film.

But I also thought it would be nice to be able to stick stuff on from outside of our building, so today I've been struggling with how to handle a web-upload form.

I know what you're thinking BTW: "Hey Siobhan, web-uploads aren't hard — you just use a form and then tinker with $_FILE variables..."

True, but something I discovered today is that if you call the same mammoth bash script from within a PHP script that seems to work fine on the commandline, it can sometimes go wrong.

Bloody nightmare, long story. Lots of scripts just hanging in mid air, or silently exiting, chuckling to themselves with a "We're not going to tell you what went wrong" refrain.

In the end, I kinda managed it. You upload the file (how long did it take me to realise that I needed to up the "upload limit" in php.ini so that I could accept movies...), it gets shoved in a temporary folder while the JPEGS are being made — I figured that if I started with the JPEGs, then at least the user could see something was happening. Then, when it's finished, it get's mved to a watch folder, and in the database, a variable "status" is set to '0'.

Meanwhile, another script called by cron every fifteen minutes checks that watch folder and mvs everything in it somewhere else so it can work on them. I use qt_export again, to make h264 .movs of each of the files, but I also use ffmpeg to make an .mp4, ready for podcasting.

Once everything id done, I change the "status" to '1', so the website knows to show it properly.

...

Look, I'm proud of it OK?

The website itself though, it started out looking like something I've been meaning to develop this weblog into — that idea of a stream of stuff that I had a while ago — but, as time went on, and I added more and more things to it (like comments, how many times things had been viewed, little avatars for each user...), something at the back of my head started niggling me.

OMG I've ripped off Flickr

Arse.

Anyway, never mind, it mostly all works right now — and that's the main thing. I've a lot to do to it before I can show it (not because of any kind of 'stealth' thing — just because I'd like to show my colleagues first), not least of which being enabling audio files as well as video. And maybe photographs. And text.

And the moon on a stick.

(pre-collapse-in-bed update: 1.40am Just had an idea Erin is only a 500MHz G4. CuChullainn is a Dual 1.8GHz G5. CuChullain encodes things about 6 times faster than Erin, and so it would be good to use him instead of her. But not when I want to use him, obviously. The challenge would be working out when I'm around/using him ... so, how about if when my Mobile isn't in BlueTooth range, all the encoding gets forked off to CuChullain? That, I think, would be a rather cool thing ... I'm going to bed now)

Ack, anyway, finish on a pretty picture I guess. That usually makes up for being tedious and borng. This is the machine at Leeds that does all the grunt-work:

Mmmmm. Front Row Something I learnt today BTW (thanks Jon!) is that Salling Clicker can control it. Which means I'm going to have to STFW for that page I saw the other week about how to run Front Row on a Mac that doesn't come with a remote...

But still. Enough geeky bollocks I think.

At some point, I must go off on one about "wearing dresses" again. People used to like when I wrote about that

Yes, you're all very funny

[~]$ man coffee

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

If there was a manual entry for coffee, it would probably say something like "add the coffee before you add the water and milk"

Which by that point the Coffee would have gone cold

...and your system would be overrun with a "Tea" virus

Connective Stealth

Over the past year or so, I've made a conscious decision to be a lot more 'careless' about anonymity and the like. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it's got a lot to do with the convergence of my 'boy' and 'girl' lives, and the desire for them both to be taken a bit more seriously.

I mean, I've talked about this before — the notion that since I spend pretty much all my time online in a sort of "Siobhan" head-space, and since that the vast majority of Things That I Do™ these days seem to revolve around piddling about online, I'm having to be a lot more candid about who I am as a person.

It's as if, if I wasn't more candid, I'd be "wasting" all the effort I put into things like this. I you catch my drift.

This has nothing, BTW, to do with clothes, I think. It doesn't really matter whether I'm writing this is a wedding dress, a suit, or my pants (jeans and a jumper, since you ask. Sorry), just by engaging with this weblog — whether writing on it, or linking to it, or having it my .sig — automatically says "This man pretends to be a woman".

Or something.

I think though, that the general outcomes of the decisions I made about this time last year, have been on the whole rather positive. Hiding behind the Tranniesphere Sofa and not peeking out to face the Dalek Hoardes of the Vanilla Folk was all very well and good — but it was so frustrating to be closeted.

OK, so I'm not "out" as such — althought I think there's more people that know about Siobhan than those that don't — but I'm feeling a whole lot better about myself as a result of all this. It's like it's not a little shameful secret anymore, and I can be as open and as proud about who/what I am as I skim my way around the 23.3 million blogs that Technorati is currently claiming exist.

Not sure quite what I'm trying to say here BTW I think this little thought was sparked off by seeing myself crop up on the front pages of quite a few Google searches I did while I was looking for information about encoding techniques.

I guess that shouldn't be too surprising, considering how much I blather on about shit like that all the time. But it's quite an odd feeling inside to be searching for something totally unrelated to crossdressing, and see your weblog pop up.

On the whole, I'm not really bothered by that — indeed, I'm rather proud of it if I'm honest. The one fear I've got is that some day my parents will come across this (they're still the only two people I've sworn not to come out to). So, despite being all blasée about linkage and little signifiers to my real name, I'm still defiantly careful not to actually let my surname appear on this.

Because, my Dad, being a bit of a geneology enthusiast, Googles for it every day.

(I do too, but in a much more egotistical way )

3153

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

There is actually a reason for this one. A subtle symbolism that might play out in the not too distant future