I can finally show off my week­end pro­ject! Well okay the vestiges of it star­ted a couple week­ends ago and it bled into this morn­ing by a couple hours, but I think it still counts as a week­end project.

Jasna and I don’t have cable or an antenna for our TV, which means we down­load everything we watch, or bor­row it from friends on rare occa­sions. My Mac­Book was start­ing to run near the end of its use­ful life as my main work com­puter — the track­pad was becom­ing unus­able which meant I couldn’t depend on it when trav­el­ling — but it’s still got some life in it as a server. It was wire­less net­work­ing (no cables to string around), uses very little power, is com­pletely silent, comes with media soft­ware (Front Row) and comes with a remote con­trol, is really small (less than 2cm tall), which makes it more or less the per­fect media server.

The only down­side is it was a pain to get shows onto it to watch, as you have to search for the shows manu­ally, down­load them, then copy them manu­ally over to the server. So, I decided to make a web interface.

Check here for screen­shots of the new web inter­face for the media server. EasyN­ews, our Usenet pro­vider, provides very handy ser­vices like global searches, thumb­nails and AutoUn­RAR­ing. A big bene­fit to this is not hav­ing to wait until some­thing has fin­ished down­load­ing it before watch­ing it. So far I’ve got ser­vices for down­load­ing from Usenet — which is where we get almost all of our TV shows to watch, down­load­ing CFL games from TSN and just upload­ing indi­vidual files from your browser. At some point I need to set up schedul­ing so that it auto­mat­ic­ally down­loads new epis­odes of shows when they’re released, but I guess that’s for another weekend.

I’m kind of embar­rassed at how proud I am to have actu­ally fin­ished it in a week­end like I’d planned, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing I haven’t done any web devel­op­ment in years and years. The astute of you may have noticed I used straight-​​up CGI instead of tech­no­lo­gies the cool kids are using: no love from me for PHP or RoR or Ajax or any­thing. Since I haven’t put any pass­word secur­ity in yet — that’s for another week­end yet — and the box is pub­licly address­able via IPv6 I’ve had access to the web inter­face to just within our local net­work, but if IPv6 takes off some day it’ll be cool to be able to down­load movies while I’m away from home.

Jasna and I just got back today from a spur-​​of-​​the-​​moment camp­ing trip. We’d been want­ing to have a couple days just for the two of us for a while now, and our sched­ules aligned, so why not? We thought camp­ing would be more fun and relax­ing than any­thing else, and I’ve wanted to see the towns along the Grand River forever, so we com­bined the two and went to Rock Point Pro­vin­cial Park: it’s vir­tu­ally right where the Grand River emp­ties into Lake Erie and neces­sit­ates driv­ing along the Grand River, a fairly nice drive.

I’ve got a grand total of 3 pic­tures from the trip and I’m happy with that. It wasn’t the sort of trip to you take to take pic­tures of. Appar­ently the park is known for its fossils, but we didn’t go hunt­ing for those, either. We went down to the beach a few times — twice for moon­light swims — and spent most of the rest of our time in our camp­site sit­ting around and talk­ing and enjoy­ing one another. We got a nice camp­site with fairly good pri­vacy and shade, and none of the camp­sites dir­ectly around us were taken. It was pretty much the per­fect couple of days, only because we were together.

Jasna bought me an e-​​reader! She actu­ally bought it before we’d planned on going on the trip, but I guess this seemed a good time to give it to me, and give me an easier time read­ing. It’s a Kobo, which I adore. I’m actu­ally a bit of a freak in that I’m some­what anti-​​paper: I often prefer read­ing on screen to read­ing on paper; maybe it’s a side-​​effect of grow­ing up with a com­puter. The Kobo has a really beau­ti­ful dis­play and is easier for me to read than any­thing I’ve ever read from, CRT, LCD or paper. The dis­play can’t refresh very often — maybe once a second or some­thing like that — and it’s super low-​​powered which makes it unsuit­able for any­thing but read­ing, which suits me fine. I have only two com­plaints: firstly, that the font size is typ­ic­ally too big, but that’s a cri­ti­cism of the books that are format­ted for it, not the device itself; and secondly, that it’s really dif­fi­cult to skip for­ward or back­ward a lot of pages at a time. With paper it’s easy to do a bin­ary search for the page you want, but the Kobo seems determ­ined to make you do a lin­ear search.

I did bring my laptop, but only so I could do just enough work to make my guilt levels fall to the point where I could genu­inely relax. It turns out that’s about half an hour, ha! I’m still more or less pleased with how the thesis is progressing.

This art­icle is for you if you’re a Cana­dian foot­ball fan, you don’t have cable TV, you use an oper­at­ing sys­tem which doesn’t run Microsoft Sil­ver­light (such as Linux) and you can’t afford to go out to the bar all the time to watch foot­ball games. I may have described only one per­son (myself), but just in case there’s another per­son out there, I will describe to you how to watch your foot­ball games. I should say that while I’m no law­yer, my under­stand­ing is that what I describe here could become illegal should Bill C-​​32 pass, and we all hope it won’t.

The first and most import­ant part is to install rtm­p­dump, a util­ity which you will use to actu­ally down­load the video stream. I’m using a rel­at­ively ancient ver­sion of rtm­p­dump and I don’t think it mat­ters par­tic­u­larly which ver­sion you use.

From there all that is needed is a way to get the rtmp URLs of the game you want. To use the script below, you give it a link to a game you want to down­load — some­thing of the form http://​watch​.tsn​.ca/​c​f​l​-​g​a​m​e​s​-​o​n​-​d​e​m​a​n​d​/​w​e​e​k​-​1​-​a​l​o​u​e​t​t​e​s​-​v​s​-​r​o​u​g​h​r​i​d​e​rs/ (one of the best foot­ball games I’ve seen in a long time, incidentally) — as an argu­ment. It then extracts the clip IDs for each quarter (includ­ing over­time, if needed), determ­ines the rtmp URL for each video clip, and down­loads the video files in sequence.

It’s worked well for me but there are cer­tainly no guar­an­tees about it. CTV could break it eas­ily if they so wanted (if you’re read­ing this, CTV, please don’t be mean­ies. Let’s be BFFs). The only unfor­tu­nate down­side to it is that CTV poten­tially loses out on some advert­ising rev­enue. My recom­mend­a­tion is to stare extra hard at the com­mer­cials to make up for it on the days you do go out to the bar to watch a game. Head­ing out to the sta­dium — at the very least whenever the Riders are in town — would also be a nice way to sup­port the league and TSN for put­ting games up online.

Check out the pic­ture gal­lery. Even though it was all cat­egory the­ory, and con­sequently I can fol­low almost none of the other talks, it’s still a won­der­ful con­fer­ence to go to. It’s a nice atmo­sphere, a good mix­ture of grad stu­dents, pro­fess­ors and pro­fess­ors emeriti.

After the con­fer­ence I stayed in Cal­gary for another couple weeks work­ing on my thesis and going through bounds infer­ence in detail with Brian. Unfor­tu­nately, and excit­ingly, we found a big prob­lem with the mix­ture of coin­duct­ive and induct­ive recur­sion which can take one out of poly­no­mial time. I may write on that more at some other time, but only after I think of a good way to describe it, at which point the first place it will appear is my thesis.

The fol­low­ing ffffff­fuuuuuuuuuuuu describes most of my life for this week:

I’m fly­ing out to Cal­gary Sunday morn­ing and then head­ing to Kana­nas­kis for FMCS. My code is already work­ing for many cases, but it’s not as com­plete as I’d like it to be. I’d like to do a proper demon­stra­tion of bounds infer­ence when I give my talk. It’s a pretty laid-​​back con­fer­ence so, truth be told, even if I don’t get it totally work­ing by then I can still just demo what I have, or just not demo at all.

I went to FMCS once before, in 2004 at the end of my under­grad. It’s a very nice con­fer­ence, less formal than most, which makes it a lot more fun and a lot more pro­duct­ive, I think. After the con­fer­ence I’ll be hanging around in Cal­gary for another week or so work­ing on my thesis and hanging out with the par­ents. Good times.

I bought a new laptop a couple days ago. For the past 6 years I’ve been using Macs just about exclus­ively; for the past 3 years or so it’s been my Mac­Book that’s been my main machine. How­ever, for the past sev­eral months I’ve been increas­ingly annoyed with the Mac­Book: the case is crack­ing; the track­pad but­ton is stick­ing; and, some­thing which mat­ters to very people other than me, Apple has been slow in fix­ing some bugs and the source code wasn’t avail­able for me to fix them myself. So, after much delib­er­a­tion, a couple days ago I picked up a Toshiba Satel­lite, on sale and marked down even fur­ther because it was a demo model. Accord­ing to the spe­cific­a­tions it’s bet­ter than a mod­ern Mac­Book in pretty well every way, and at about one quarter the price. The only down­side was it didn’t run OS X, which I was becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned with anyway.

I inten­ded to run OpenSol­aris on it because I quite like the tech­no­lo­gies in OpenSol­aris. Unfor­tu­nately OpenSolaris’s hard­ware sup­port is very poor, but the laptop I bought looked like it had the highest chances of work­ing, and it was very highly rated by Con­sumer Reports as well. After try­ing vari­ous OpenSol­aris dis­tri­bu­tions and developer builds, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that it’s not going to work, at least not yet. It was prob­ably naïve of me to think I could get my wire­less card work­ing under OpenSolaris.

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Every now and then I find some­thing that blows my mind at how awe­some the Inter­net is. The first mind-​​blowing exper­i­ence for me was more than 15 years ago, when I dis­covered the Future Crew’s home BBS in Hel­sinki, Met­ro­poli, was online, and I wouldn’t have to wait months to get the latest demos out of Fin­land anymore.

Today it was find­ing 360º pan­or­a­mas of the moon. Check it out right now. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to stand on a for­eign world. And yes, I’ve seen the movie Moon, but it didn’t quite do it for me. These pan­or­a­mas were really amaz­ing for me, though, prob­ably the closest I’ll ever get to stand­ing on the moon myself.

The Apollo 17 pan­or­ama is prob­ably my favour­ite due to the geo­graphy of the area, the boulders and “moun­tains”. The Apollo 12 pan­or­ama is nice just to appre­ci­ate how ghetto the lander was and how incred­ible it is that NASA was able to pull the mis­sions off so well given the tech­no­logy of the time.

I’m going to be going to attend­ing FMCS 2010 in Kana­nas­kis — not far from Cal­gary — in a couple weeks. I’ll be giv­ing a talk on the imple­ment­a­tion of Pola in some capa­city, though I haven’t figured out how broadly scoped or what to focus on.

I’m get­ting pretty psyched about it. The con­fer­ence will be fun if it’s any­thing like I remem­ber FMCS 2004 to be. The loc­a­tion is amaz­ing. Plus after that I get to spend some time in Cal­gary with my par­ents and hanging out with Brian and, prob­ably most import­antly but least awe­somely, work­ing on my thesis.

Today’s xkcd is so val­id­at­ing. I first stumbled across the GNU mani­festo prob­ably in 1996, when I was in high school. I wanted to teach myself C and a good way to do that was to use the DJGPP com­piler, which led me to GNU. I didn’t really think much of it at the time except that these “Free Soft­ware Found­a­tion” people took soft­ware way too ser­i­ously, but I was happy to have a free com­piler to play with.

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I’ll make a research-​​oriented entry before long; I prom­ise. I’m start­ing to get towards writ­ing up some of the cool stuff in my thesis.

I’ve star­ted writ­ing an Itanium tutorial. That doc­u­ment will magic­ally update every now and then as I write more. On the one hand it’s slightly embar­rass­ing how much I’ve writ­ten — it’s almost half as much as I’ve writ­ten for my thesis so far — but it’s an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of writ­ing. There’s really no rigour at all to it. I don’t have to worry about prov­ing things or cit­ing things; I’ve never proofread any of it. I just write whatever pops into my head, which makes it very quick and easy. Primar­ily it’s for my bene­fit, so I don’t for­get any­thing and so that it forces me to fig­ure things out more con­cretely than I would otherwise.

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